6 Steps of
SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT
The Process
REQUIREMENTS
Requirements gathering is the first most crucial phase of the software development life cycle. It decides how your software will look and perform at the end. To build a quality software, it is imperative to spend ample time in this phase. During this step, the project managers or business analyst meet with the customer and ask for the software specifications. It happens during communication, business meetings or during interviews with customers. Therefore, it is recommended to ask open-ended questions to pull out the maximum details of the project. The more information you gathered, the more it will become easy to understand client expectations from the project.
ANALYSIS
Once you are done with the requirements gathering, you need to draw the project timeline and scope. Not only this, but the second phase also helps you to explore the functional and non-functional requirements of the project.
DESIGN
When you have the SRS in your hand, then it’s the time to move on to phase 3. In this phase, you design the architecture of the software. Considering technical requirements you can propose one or more than one design approach and document it in a DDS (Design Document Specification). There are two types of design; high-level design and low-level design. High-Level Design is the overall software design covering the system architecture and database design. It helps you to understand the flow of the system. Whereas, the low-level design is the extension of HLD. Class diagrams and entity relationship diagrams all comes under LLD, and it covers all the programs specifications.
CODING
This phase requires developers to implement what has been decided in the previous phases. The developers build the code, test, integrate and manage. It is the longest phase of SDLC because all the development takes place in this phase. As the life cycle is divided into manageable pieces, it needs to be accomplished step by step. The implementation in this phase depends on the development model you choose for your project.
TESTING
Testing is the crucial phase of the software development life cycle. It helps to find the bugs and errors of the software. There are four different types of testing; unit testing, integration testing, acceptance testing and system testing. The testing team test each project module and check either they are functioning properly. After passing through the various testing stages, the software is ready to go live.
DEPLOY
In this stage, the software is released in the market. Sometimes, the project is released to the current clients only and based on their feedback changes are made. After the project is released successfully in the market, maintenance is carried out for customers. The project team updates software to make sure it is relevant to the current market needs.