The Software Development Life Cycle enables developers to take a more methodical approach to product development, enabling them to cover all essential elements of successfully operating a software. Since it gives developers control and enables them to effectively manage the development and management process at a high level, the software development process is essential. Since developers may simultaneously fix their mistakes during the process, it also lowers the likelihood that a project would fail.
6 Phases of Software Development
- Requirements definition
- Planning & Analysis
- Design
- Coding & Development
- Testing
- Deployment and Maintenance
Let’s go over each of these stages in more depth.
Phase 1 : Requirements definition
The first stage of software development is planning stage, in which you collect requirements from your client or stakeholders, and the requirement analysis stage, in which you examine the viability of developing the product, potential for revenue, the cost of production, user needs, etc.
You can use a feature prioritizing methodology that considers the value of the software/update, the cost, the time it takes to construct, and other criteria to appropriately select what to make, what not to make, and what to make first.
Determining the resources required to complete the project is another aspect of requirements definition. For instance, a team might create software to manage a machine for custom manufacturing. Having the machine during the development process is necessary for the procedure.
You can proceed to the second stage once it has been determined that the software or update is possible to build, meets user needs, and is consistent with business and stakeholder goals.
Phase 2: Planning & Analysis
In essence, system analysis is a feasibility study to determine the viability of your project. The objective is to investigate your software’s concept through the eyes of a business executive attempting to steer clear of a disastrous investment. You’ll need to create the rest of the concept and come up with arguments for why it should be expanded. The design and development stages will be outlined in part by the work done in this step.
The project timetable and scope need to be drawn after the requirements collection is complete. Additionally, the second phase aids in your exploration of the project’s functional and non-functional requirements.
The process of gathering factual data, identifying software problems, comprehending the information architecture, and creating solutions to address the project’s vulnerabilities is known as software analysis. The final cost is established by a software requirement specification (SRS), which is constructed. Additionally, it outlines the functionalities that will be created along the course of the project.
Phase 3: Design
You develop your software’s completely formed design throughout the system design phase. Here, all of the design work is completed so that the project’s development team can get to work. Since the development team can start establishing processes for further development and organizing resources, both teams are frequently engaged at this stage.
The creation of a prototype will frequently be part of the design phase. The team may be able to see the final product’s appearance and make adjustments without having to deal with rewriting code by developing a pre-production version of the product.
Phase 4: Coding & Development
In the actual development phase, the development team converts business needs and product specifications into code that creates the product.
It may take a while to complete this stage. It’s crucial to establish a clear time frame and set of objectives so that the software developers and team managers can monitor the development process’ progress.
When particular tests are done to make sure there are no serious bugs, the development stage and testing stage may occasionally overlap.
Phase 5: Testing
The work could be forwarded for system testing after the majority of it is finished. Before being made available to the general public, all software is rigorously tested. In order to quickly test scenarios and identify software issues, the Quality Assessment (QA) team uses tools like automated testers.
The most important stage of the software development life cycle is testing. It aids in the discovery of software faults and problems. Unit testing, integration testing, acceptance testing, and system testing are the four different forms of testing. Each project module is tested by the testing team to ensure appropriate operation. The software is prepared to go online after clearing all of the testing phases.
Phase 6: Deployment and Maintenance
The software is provided to your target user during the deployment phase. Depending on the type, you can plan your deployment and automate this process. For instance, you can do so with a small number of users if you are merely implementing a feature update (canary release).
Users may discover bugs and problems in the maintenance phase that were missed during the first testing phase. In order to improve user retention and experience, these problems must be corrected. In some circumstances, they can result in the software development life cycle being restarted at step one.