The software development process is all about the sequences of activities followed to produce a software product. It does play a pivotal role in digital transformation, in which technologies are incorporated to improvise business strategies as per user needs. 

Starting from planning, and design, to development and testing, a structured pattern gets followed to achieve the desired software product. 

This blog post will explain the process of developing a software and the way testing fits within to help aspiring developers and freelancers understand the robust engineering team functionality in simple words. 

The product development cycle (PDLC) and structured software development cycle (SDLC) are two efficient ways to take forward the initial design process to deployment and then to ongoing operations. 

Let’s get on to a quick guide to better understand the PDLC and SDLC process and steps.

What is PDLC (Product Development Lifecycle)?

The PDLC refers to the complete process involved in creating and launching the product to the market. It involves the following steps. 

1) Product Conceptualization

Every software coding process starts from here with a futuristic idea. Once the idea gets curated, significant time will be spent on market research, technical analysis, ROI, prototype development, and feasibility analysis.

2) Product Architecture and Design

The next step involves designing the technical architecture patterns of the product. In this particular phase, the business team shall provide the required set of business-related specifications to the technical team. They shall, later on, build on the product’s architecture and work on creating the workflow diagrams and the DB design.

3) Product Development

In this software development method, the design team works on developing the desired product. They shall use Agile or Waterfall methodologies to expand the product’s growth. The teams develop and perform unit, integration, performance, and other forms of testing types according to the product type. Post this phase, the Alpha release gets created for limited access among external users.

4) Product Release

The team behind the software development process becomes confident regarding the usability, functionality, and stability part of the product in this phase. The feedback received from the Alpha release is utilized toward creating the Beta phase. Companies at this stage, mostly remain open to all their customers or with Beta testers providing access to them all. 

Once the feedback is reviewed and the required changes are done, the product is made available for a public release.

5) Product Realization and Future Upgradation

The product is continually monitored in this phase, based on its growth and usage among the users. Besides future enhancements, the team prioritizes fixing bugs reported in the public release. 

What is SDLC (Software Development Lifecycle)?

Software Development Life Cycle is an inherent approach followed by the software industry to meet up with the process of designing, developing, and testing the software. 

SDLC’s main goal is to create high-quality software that goes well and beyond customer expectations and to reach completion within the estimated time and software development cost. 

• Plan: The most important step in software development is planning the requirements as collected from the client and working on analyzing them with a futuristic scope. 
• Design: The software engineers team up and analyze the acquired set of business requirements to find valid design solutions.
• Implement: This software development procedure involves writing the code post analyzing the requirements.
• Test: Bugs, errors, and flaws from the code-written software are discovered in this stage.
• Document: Every activity executed in the project gets documented for future enhancement and development purposes.
• Deployment: The software gets deployed once it passes through the release approval stage.
• Maintaining: This software development process happens once the product turns operational. It involves focusing on continual monitoring of the system performance, identifying bugs, and implementing respective changes to the same. 

Commonly Used Software Development Methods – Explained

There are two types of commonly followed software development methodologies.

1. Waterfall model
2. Agile Model

What happens in the Waterfall Model?

The waterfall model has a linear type of software development approach. The upcoming steps are followed sequentially in the form of water flow.

• Requirements: Collect, analyze, and document
• Design: Developing the software architecture
• Code: Development and integration of software
• Testing: systematic discovery of defects and debugging them
• Operations: Installation, support, and complete system-based maintenance. 

What happens in the Agile Model?

The agile model focuses on continual improvement and flexibility following a step-by-step approach.

• Developers of an experienced development team get started with a simplistic design and work on smaller modules.
• The modules are carried out in either weekly or monthly sprints, during which the project priorities are evaluated, tested, and executed. 
• The sprints help in exploring possible bugs and resolving the ones collected from customer feedback. 

Conclusion

Once the software development process is well-managed and enforced with documentation, results shall flow in fast, efficient, and low-risk. Most software companies utilize agile testing metrics to execute product development in a short span. Always pick out the software development methodology based on adaptability rate, better ROI, and faster release cycles.                                                                                                                                                                               

FAQs

1) What’s the need for requirement gathering in software development procedure?

Requirement gathering involves the process of collecting both functional and non-functional requirements of the software project. This step is done to collect every other respective requirement from the user to achieve desired results. 

2) What does the software development process look like?

The product development procedure involves assessing the user’s need, research done on market competition, visual creation of a roadmap, conceptual design, code development, and developing a minimal viable product out of it. 

3) How many development resources are required to complete the process of software development?

The overall number of resources needed here in this context depends upon the complexity and scale of the software to be developed. Developers, testers, UI designers, technical architects, project managers, and business analysts are some of the development resources pulled into the software product development process.

4) How long does it take to develop a software application?

The time duration involved in the software development process differs based on the user’s requirements. It can only be determined based on factors like,

• Number of functions and modules to be used
• Number of future users
• Potential integration with external software
• The complexity involved in completing every set of development processes.