Best Practices for an Effective Software Development Life Cycle
Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) refers to the different stages involved in system development in software engineering, system engineering and information system. It focuses on software and hardware and a combination of both. It makes the long and tedious process of software development easy and efficient. Having a SDLC helps to convert the idea of a project into a functional and completely operational structure. Technically, SDLC helps with process development, user experience, change management and policies. Another advantage of SDLC is that it helps to plan ahead of time, estimate the cost, staffing decision, define goals, measure performance, and validate points at each phase of the cycle to boost the quality of the final product. A reliable software development company follows best practices of Software Development Life Cycle that helps businesses to meet their needs and ensure customer satisfaction.
The Software Development Life Cycle is the application of a set of rules and practices that helps to connect every team member and transform exceptional ideas into unique software solutions. Here are 7 best ways to launch the best software development life cycle.
- Planning: Planning is one of the most important steps in the software development life cycle process. Proper planning also helps to determine the scope of the project, identify means, new ways to meet business strategic objectives, availability of resources, cost-issues, and timeframes and determine solutions. One can go forward with a software development project only with a proper plan. Having a detailed plan right from the beginning would help you to go forward effortlessly.
- Analysis: This is the second stage where the project is analyzed in detail and the study of project feasibility is carried out. To build an actionable solution, it is important that the team has a good understanding about the project and its goals and gather all the requirements. Feasibility analysis shows all the technical and economic aspects such as time, resources, tasks etc that impact the software development process. These aspects can also be used to calculate ROI and find out the cost and profit of the project. On the other hand, requirement analysis helps to find the risks at the very start so that risk mitigation strategies can be worked out from the very beginning. So, analysis of both software and requirement is important for the success of software development life cycle.
- Design: This is the phase where the actual conceptualizing of the solution is developed, and the detailed software architecture meeting specific project requirements is created. Customized software design by software architects and engineers provides definite workflows and standards and encompasses clear overall solution/product design together with database structure and design. In this phase, the whole structure of the project is built with the final prototype and mock-ups that are used for the next stage of the process. It helps to visualize everything starting from the functionality of the solution up to defining the fundamental hardware/software components, software tools for future development, and structure capabilities to objectives of the proposed project. Once the design is identified, it’s time to move to the development stage.
- Development: The fourth phase is the development phase which involves writing code and converting design documentation into the actual software within the software development process. This is the longest phase and the backbone of the entire process. The software engineering team ensures that their codes meet the software requirements specification, comply to the stakeholder’s requirements etc. Once the complete architecture and functionality of the solution is built, the next stage is testing.
- Integration Testing: This is the stage of testing and integration and the test may vary depending on the adopted testing process. The Quality Assurance team conducts a series of tests including functionality testing, systems integration, interoperability and user acceptance testing, etc to ensure the code is clean and the business goals of the solution are met. In this stage, verification and validation is a vital part that ensures the project is successful.
- Implementation: In this stage, the installation of the developed solution takes place, which is a step-by-step implementation plan. The new application is moved to production including data and components transfer while during the next releases only the specific changes will be used. Depending on the complexity of the project, the release can be straightforward or scattered.
- Operations and maintenance: The last and final stage includes maintenance and regular updates. This phase is treated carefully as the project is polished, upgraded, enhanced and fine-tuned depending on real-world feedbacks on its performance. This is the right time to increase the application’s functionalities to upgrade its performance and also modify depending on the actual needs of the end-user and add new capabilities or meet additional user requirements.
Software Product Development Life Cycle is a huge undertaking, so understanding the software product development life cycle and how a strategic technology partner can help you with this process is important. Partnering with a reliable software development company would help you speed up the process and meet the unique needs of the customers.