Imagine one day you woke up with a brilliant idea, and you’re excited to build a software around it, what would be your next step and how can you build a full-fledged, sustainable software product?
Building a full-fledged and sustainable software is not just about code development (programming). It is also about a series of stages that plan, design, test, and maintain the software. Sounds a bit much to digest? Don’t worry, let me take you through the ideal software development lifecycle stages.
- Planning
Planning is of utmost importance in the software development lifecycle. At this stage, you would need to identify current problems (gaps), potential stakeholders, including the demand for that particular solution that you are intending to provide. Building a software that nobody uses would obviously result in a waste of effort and time. The next step is to plan out the requirements needed to minimize risks of building your software product. This includes planning an efficient infrastructure or using existing 3rd party cloud services to minimize development costs.
- Design
In this stage, there will be more design mockups, wireframes, and prototypes of the software that encapsulate the stakeholder’s inputs and feedback.
- Development
The development phase is when the actual construction of the software starts. Design files in the second stage would be translated into customizable source code. Product management method AGILE DEVELOPMENT would often be the methodology implemented to deliver the value of the product faster.
- Testing
Testing is a method to check for bugs (errors) in the software before it reaches the user. There are various ways to do testing for software. Automated unit testing helps to test both the functionality and performance of the software, while manual testing helps to ensure that the user would expect no error while going through their daily usage of the software. All these methods help the product to be more stable when deploying new changes to the users.
- Maintenance
The maintenance phase consists of bugs fixing or upgrading an application to a new version. Whenever a user discovers a bug, the product moves back through the software lifecycle to stage 3, to fix and undergo testing.
Going through the software lifecycle helps to enhance the reliability as well as the usefulness of a software. Building a software should always start with the understanding of the need for it, followed by its structure, and having multiple checks to improve users’ experience when using the software.
