Step by Step Guide to Software Product Development Life Cycle

Time is everything, and if you miss catching up with time, you might end up losing so many great things. An organization on the verge of building software often has plenty of goals in mind. But what if the software they build fails to fulfill their desired goals? Yes, it’s likely to happen when you don’t have a clear concept, direction, and predefined process to walk through. That’s where following a software development lifecycle comes into play.

Therefore, if you are new to software development, you need to know the software product development lifecycle right off the bat to keep you and your team from wandering halfway through the development. It helps you remain targeted toward your end goals. In this article, you’re going to walk through the complete 6 steps of the software development life cycle.

Let’s Keep an eagle eye!

What’s Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC)?

The software development life cycle, also known as (SDLC), consists of a series of steps that are followed by a team of engineers and developers working on a software development project. The life cycle begins with project analysis that goes through design and development to post-development support.

The preliminary goal of the software development life cycle is to keep the team working on the project on track and assist them in creating a product within the set time frame within the predefined budget.

The app development process, inspired by Agile philosophy, changed, but the logical process introduced in The Waterfall became a standard for creating software in both methodologies. Below are software product development life cycle stages that you need to know so that you can employ them in your project to end up building a robust software product.

Proper Research of Business Requirements

This is the first software product development life cycle stages in which an end-to-end analysis and research of the client’s business requirements takes place. You need to create a software development roadmap, no matter whether it is for custom software development or integration. In this phase, the team asks the client about their business, target customers, their requirements, their goals, and so on. The business analysts and developers explore your business requirements from different perspectives to know them well and provide you with the appropriate service you deserve.

You, too, can ask them if you have any query, including their direct or indirect competitors, pricing models, product plans, overall budget for MVC development, and so on. However, it’s the first stage of the software product development cycle; you can’t overlook it or take it lightly if you are willing to embrace quality results. After accumulating all the necessary bits of knowledge and essential information, the development company does documentation and has it handed over to the development team. This document is what’s called SRS (Software Requirements Specification).

Designing and Prototyping

Once the research and analysis phase gets completed, the designing and prototyping phase comes into play. Among all of the six software product development life cycles, the design phase is of significant prominence– as it determines how the software will be. In this phase, complete designing and prototyping work takes place. The developers working on the very project make use of the details given through the SRS and outline comprehensive details of software development understandable to all the team members.

The key details that the development team outlines include the system interface, user interface, database network requirements, and so on. The team transforms the SRS document into a more logically understandable manner for seamless execution of this to program software development. The development team then executes different plans for different things, including operation, maintenance, training, and so on, so that the developers can be aware of what they’re going to do further.

After the design gets done, the developers and product development managers work on a design document which plays a pivotal role throughout the development procedure. The developers then also design a prototype, as well as an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) of the software utilizing basic research to make sure the ideas and their implementations work well in real life.

Software Product Development

It’s the next software product life cycle model that comes into effect after project analysis and design. The development phase comes into play, in which the development of the software product takes place. This stage is the lifeline of the entire software development lifecycle. The team of developers has to put an immense amount of time and effort into this phase as they are required to create different software components. There are plenty of tasks associated with the software development lifecycle; hence, they’re distributed across the team members to accelerate the project development and make sure the delivery happens in time.

The developers, deployed on the project development, write codes for specific components based on their specialization. Besides, creating an eye-catching UI for the software and making sure interaction with the server is also the responsibility of the developers. Database administrators add the essential data to the database or the software. The developers have to follow the guidelines and coding standards if there are any. Excellent execution of this phase ends up yielding a well-functional software product.

Quality Assurance Testing

When the development is done, testing comes into effect in the software product life cycle. The software product goes through complete testing for quality assurance. In this phase, developers and testers work hand in hand to make sure a developed product delivers high-end results and is able to extinguish the requirements of the client. The QA team performs comprehensive tests to assess the quality of the final product. This phase consists of a variety of testing, including performance testing, functional testing, unit testing, usability testing, security testing, and so on.

Look at the following to know what these tests determine for the quality of the software:

When the QA experts look into the software for possible bugs, and if they find any, they ask the software developers to fix them. Once the development team fixes the glitch, the QA team tests it again, and if they find any bug again, the developers need to fix that. The testing process continues to happen until the QA team finds no glitch in the software product.

Software Product Deployment

When the software product development, as well as testing, is accomplished and the product is ready to be deployed, the deployment phase comes into play. This phase accounts for a complete deployment of newly-developed software for its users to use. Initially, in the pre-testing stage, when the software seems ready to be deployed, it gets transferred to production. This is the stage where project managers work hand in hand and collaborate with the client to launch the product.

Post-Development Support & Maintenance

Maintenance is one of the crucial parts involved with the software development lifecycle. Once your product gets deployed, it’s available for its users, and that’s the moment you need to implement maintenance to fix whatever issues the product comes across. This stage enables the client to continue the maintenance of the software with developers.

After development, maintenance supports the clients in keeping their systems upgraded and aligned with the client’s requirements. This gives clients an experience in cost-effective software development.

Final Thoughts:

When it comes to software development, the software product development life cycle plays a vital role. This keeps the team working on the project determined and goal-oriented. A software product development lifecycle is a step-by-step process involving various steps associated with software development, for instance, analysis, designing, development, testing, deployment, and post-development assistance. We have discussed all software product development stages and hope you will find it helpful.

As a high-end client-centric software product development company, we ensure following every step of a software development life cycle, so there’s no possibility of getting wandered in between the project development and. This helps you end up yielding a product that extinguishes all the needs of businesses.