Have a great business idea for a new application? Don’t know how to start it? You need an expert advice.
Let’s have a look what exactly you can do with your idea to make it work for you and bring a good revenue. First of all, with anything related to software and applications, you need a team of professionals. In your case, we’re talking about qualified software development services and their expert ideas to modify your own one.
Let’s have a look at the software development cycle in details, trying to understand how to use your ideas and budget in the right way.
SDLC or Software Development Cycle
SDLC is a software development cycle or a set of fixed steps, which should be done in order to create a high-quality product which meets the requirements of a customer and is cost-effective enough for the current budget and the future maintenance. The requirements of the customer are translated into a design, which serves as a navigation for coding.
Generally, the whole process of software development can be described in 6 steps:
- Requirements;
- Analysis;
- Design;
- Development;
- Testing;
- Deployment and maintenance.
The first two steps – requirements and analysis – are the most important phases of the cycle. On this stage, the customer and the business analyst document the requirements of the customer, making notes about any product related detail and functionality. Depending on the requirements the customer has, the analyst will compose a requirement specification, which is going to be a base for a development team. On this stage, even the smallest details and nuances related to a product should be discussed and documented.
On the design phase, the team starts working on the architecture of the software product, describing how each feature and component of it should work in the end.
The next phase is a development itself. It’s when your idea becomes a real product through a coding process. The developers work on coding, building the software into a finished product. When the software phase is over, testing begins. Now, the team of QA specialists makes sure that the code is written correctly and all the functionalities mentioned in the specification work well. It is one of the most active phases. Usually, it reveals a lot of errors and improvements, which have to be done.
And the last but not the least is a deployment and maintenance phase. It comes only when the QA engineers make sure that there are no mistakes at all (of course, it is impossible to produce a 100% bug-free app, so at least 99% of the errors have to be excluded). On the stage of deployment and implementation the hidden errors, which can be monitored only when the product is in use, reveal. So, the team is continuously monitoring and eliminating those errors, trying to make a product an ideal one accordingly to customer’s requirements and user’s preferences.
As you can see, a software development process is a long-term cycle, which is divided into specific sections, which a certain group of specialists is responsible for.
