Software development is the design, documentation, programming, testing and ongoing maintenance of software. In this blog, we will share the complete details of the quality custom software development lifecycle.
Steps Involved in the Software Development Lifecycle
- Discover – The first step in quality custom software development is the discovery stage. An agile methodology helps in guiding the work process for the project. You can choose practices like DevOps guide practices during the development and operations stage. Use efficient tools to develop the product research documents and share the design files during this stage.
- Plan – This is where you must identify the stakeholders and set the budgets and the infrastructure requisitioned. Break down the design documents from the concept phase into actionable tasks. Use efficient software to manage, track and organize the task lists.
- Building and Testing – The development teams work to build production-ready software that will meet the necessary requirement and feedback. Therefore, you must ensure an efficient developer experience.
- Deploy – Once the code is written, tested and merged, it’s time to deploy. You can use software to ease the deployment process. However, the live production code needs a place to live. Consider using cloud hosting services.
- Operate – Regarding quality custom software development services, support and maintenance are needed for active software projects. Therefore, if you are in the business of software development services, you need to offer support and maintenance to your clients.
- Observe – This is where development and operations respond to unplanned events and help restore the services through reliable methods to prioritize incidents. Thus, it helps in getting quicker resolutions.
Best Practices for Quality Custom Software Development
- Customer Feedback – Throughout the quality software development process, you must generate reports to improve future development strategies, ask your clients to offer inputs about the impact of the product features, and share business outcomes with the stakeholders. When you have continuous feedback, the teams can improve the process and increase the customers’ value.
- Security – Being a quality custom software development company, we can say that as the software application gets more features, scale and complexity, you cannot stick to the traditional Q&A and security at the end of the release cycle to keep the software safe. Instead, it is better to keep testing throughout the software development lifecycle to minimize the bugs in the code.
The Different Types of Software Development
- Application development – This is the quality custom software development process that offers functionality for the users to perform tasks. Examples include office productivity suites, social media tools, media players, and booking systems. Applications can run on the user’s equipment, or they can also run on the servers hosted in the cloud or by an internal IT team. Media streaming development is an example of application development for the cloud.
- System software development – The quality custom system software development offers the core functions like operating systems, storage systems, databases, networks and hardware management.
- Development tools – The development tools offer software developers the tools to do their job. These include code editors, compilers, linkers, test harnesses and debuggers.
- Embedded software development – This type of software development creates the software used to control devices and machines, including phones, robots, and automobiles.
Every category of quality custom software development process will attract different types of software developers with different personalities and specializations. For instance, medical device software development requires a software developer that are fully conversant in creating safety-critical systems. This is a specialization that an application developer may not possess. Likewise, a music software developer must have musical ability along with a knowledge of formal music theory to become successful in developing software for the performance of music and notations.