The process and various types of Software Development popular in the industry
A collection of activities related to software advancement that involves a wide range of processes such as designing, creating, and deploying the software and all its supporting components on different platforms.
From providing developers all the tools required such as editors, compilers and debuggers to a large community support, there are a lot of finer nuances that encompass software development.
What is software development?
The process involved in visualising, identifying, designing, coding, and documenting a project along with the testing and debugging processes encompass a portion of software development. Along with these, there are various activities involved after a project is developed from maintaining the source code, frameworks, and applications to the final deployment of the software on the user end.
Researching, developing, modifying, deciding the prototype, re-engineering and maintaining the software are some of the roles of software developers. The development of the software can be for various reasons and different business purposes. Commonly used for clients and business, for potential users or for personal use, there are a wide variety of purposes for software development.
Activities involved in software development
Identifying the purpose:
Nothing is possible without having an idea. These ideas can stem from market research and analysis of a customer’s sales and business with the organization, catering to what their needs are. Generally, a marketing personnel evaluates the credibility of these ideas keeping in mind the company’s budget and market trends, called as the marketing evaluation phase.
Planning the processes:
Planning is the most crucial step in software development as here, the requirements and constraints are analysed.
Designing:
After the planning process is completed, the next step would be the designing of the software document that can include high level designs along with the programming languages, operating systems required and hardware components that can be used in developing the software.
Implementing, testing, and documenting:
In the implementation stage, developers code the program for the project using the programming languages decided at the designing stage.
Software testing is the phase where the actual software development process begins, here glitches are brought to light and test-driven development testing use cases might be developed.
Documenting is used to decide upon the maintenance and improvement of the software including writing APIs within the software or externally. The software engineering process decided by the developers’ team will determine the internal documentation. For example, waterfall models require more documentation that agile models.
Deploying and maintaining
Deploying is done after the code is tested and approved for release. This includes the installation and customization that would be necessary at the user side.
Like all products, it is necessary to maintain software created through the software development process along with identifying faults and rectifying them. Maintenance might be required on a regular basis to ensure that customers are having a smooth experience using the software.
