Have you ever wondered how the game you play or the enterprise software you use for daily tasks is created? At tech companies like Designveloper, we adopt a process called the Software Product Development Life Cycle (SDLC) to develop such a digital product, be it enterprise software, a mobile app, or a website. But what is it exactly? Let’s learn about its six key steps in today’s article!
What is the Software Development Life Cycle?
By definition, SDLC is a framework that covers all development activities, from clarifying a software idea and planning a whole project to maintaining the software after launch.
The Software Development Life Cycle has become an indispensable part of many companies today. In an increasingly intense competition between software products, having a well-structured SDLC framework ensures your software will be developed as planned and in harmony with overall business goals.
Further, SDLC keeps a whole team on track and improves communication between the team and stakeholders. We all know that software development involves people with different roles. However, “so many men, so many minds.” Therefore, SDLC is needed to keep everyone on the same page and avoid misunderstandings or conflicts. It does so by telling everyone which business problems the software is designed to resolve, which technical requirements it requires to address these issues, how long or how much budget each functionality requires, and many more.
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6 Key Phases of the Software Product Development Life Cycle
SDLC often covers the following six stages. Please remember that the SDLC can include fewer or more stages depending on a company’s development project:
1. Planning
Well, you have a superb idea, but don’t rush to turn it into a software product if you haven’t developed a detailed plan for it. This is why this planning phase is essential to lay a foundation for the success of your software development project. Here in this stage, you’ll identify the problems that your company is currently facing and that need software to resolve. These problems may be ineffective labor management, dissatisfied customers, or frequent equipment breakdown. Once you’ve identified existing issues, you may devise technical requirements to handle them.
This planning phase is also when you have to establish the project scope, set up clear milestones, and allocate realistic resources (e.g., team members or tech stacks). All these things allow you to create a comprehensive plan for later software development.
If you skip this phase, your team may fall into ambiguous situations where conflicts may easily arise. Moreover, a poor plan can make you waste more resources than expected to build software, not to mention that the final deliverable may fail to meet your business goal and worsen existing problems. Also, it makes it hard to track progress, detect deviations, and take timely corrective action to keep the project on track.
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2. Requirement Analysis
Once you have a detailed plan, let’s move on to the second phase, in which you’ll involve stakeholders (like senior management or end users) in the project.
For outsourcing companies like Designveloper, we often start off our development journey in this stage. Accordingly, our business analysts (BAs) gather and document the needs and requirements of our clients. We can even do further research to understand accurately what end users expect from the final product.
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Besides these things, you can analyze existing systems, industry standards, company policies, and competitor products to get useful information that helps fine-tune those requirements.
Normally, there are two main types of requirements to focus on:
- Functional requirements refer to features the software must have to reach its intended goal, like a search bar, advanced filters, data processing, or AI-powered chatbots.
- Non-functional requirements describe some must-have qualities of the software, such as ad security, performance, usability, or brand identity alignment.
Once you’ve acquired a detailed list of requirements, you’ll use them to create technical specifications. These specs cover the hardware, software, and network requirements your software needs.
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3. Design
In the third stage of the Software Development Life Cycle, your team needs to convert all the requirements and technical specs into a wireframe or prototype. Think of it as a sketch of your idea.
The wireframe refers to a screen blueprint of your software that presents the structure, layout, and features of your software but does not focus on aesthetics. Meanwhile, the prototype is a high-fidelity model of your software, which adds more interactive elements like buttons to the wireframe.
You don’t need to build both. Building either is alright as long as it can help stakeholders understand your software, detect issues early, and give proper feedback so that your team can fine-tune the design. This helps your team avoid expensive changes later during development.
When you identify the layout and visual elements, it’s time to turn it into the UI/UX design. Here, you’ll build a visual interface with seamless user experience.
4. Development and Testing
This stage is where the software development process actually starts. Here, front-end and back-end developers work collaboratively with designers and other stakeholders to start coding and make the UI/UX design come alive.
While front-end designers focus on bringing interactive elements to life (as you can see on this page), back-end developers are in charge of server-side work like handling databases and ensuring the client side can seamlessly send data to the server for processing and vice versa. Also, they need to follow coding standards and design specifications to ensure the high quality and easy maintenance of the code.
When everything is built up, how can you ensure it works? This is when quality assurance (testing) comes in. The testing process includes checking on the software’s technical features, usability, and more. There are many types of testing like unit testing, system testing, integration testing, and acceptance testing. Each focuses on different aspects of the software architecture, like how components work together or how users navigate around the software.
Remember that software development and testing processes may vary depending on your development methodology. Two common methods to build software now include Waterfall and Agile.
- Waterfall is sequential. It means each development stage only depends on the result of the previous one. This makes it hard to make any changes during development. However, this capability makes it suitable for projects that have clear initial requirements and hardly encounter any change.
- Agile is more flexible. It divides a whole software development life cycle into small, manageable parts known as “sprints.” Each sprint requires focus on the most critical features of your software. This allows for frequent feedback and changes to make your software adapt to evolving requirements. Designveloper is adopting Agile frameworks for software development, and below is how we work:
5. Deployment
Once the software has gone past the final testing, you know need to deploy it to end users. Whether it’s internal enterprise software or a paid game, it must meet the specific requirements of end users. Particularly, it needs to be compatible with the device requirements of the target audience (e.g., iOS or Android).
Further, it must have smooth integration with other networks or systems. For example, a telehealth platform needs to connect seamlessly with medical systems like EHR and IoT devices (like wearable fitness trackers) to allow data transmission. In case you deploy your software application to app stores, you need to ensure the software meets their requirements like compliance with data privacy regulations or suitable content.
After the software has gone through final testing, it can be released to the end-users. The deployment process involves installing the software on the target systems and configuring it to work with any other systems it needs to interface with. The deployment process should be carefully planned and executed to ensure that the software is deployed smoothly and without any issues.
6. Maintenance
Deployment is not the end of the Software Development Life Cycle. Honestly, SDLC is an ongoing process that requires you to monitor and update the software for debugging, error fixing, and any modifications to keep end users satisfied and meet the evolving technological environment. This contributes to the long-term success of your software.
Conclusion
We hope you better understand the importance and key steps of the Software Development Life Cycle in creating high-quality digital solutions that resolve your pain points and make end users happy. If you’re struggling with software development and looking for a reliable, experienced partner to outsource this project, consider Designveloper as a perfect option! With over a decade of deep expertise and experience, we’ve successfully implemented more than 100 projects across industries. Contact us now and turn your idea into amazing software!
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