Tailored software solutions can make all the difference when you’re trying to streamline existing processes and accelerate business growth. When properly applied, they’ll ensure that your business operates quickly, smoothly, and efficiently. We’ll try to demystify the entire software development pipeline and show you how to build software that brings lasting value to your enterprise.
Purpose
Before you start conceptualizing solutions, you must understand the underlying problem that needs to be resolved. Whether it’s overwhelming amounts of data, project tracking/management, or redundant processes, some insufficiencies might not be solvable with software alone. Most likely you already have a few key issues in mind, but trying to tackle all of them at once might be unrealistic. Try focusing on the solution that will make the most drastic impact on your growth. The rest can be handled later with your newly freed-up resources.
Concept
Usually, the conceptualization phase consists of stakeholder meetings, team planning sessions, and rigorous feedback collection, where the development team tries to form an initial outline of the requirements for the project. This is the development phase where deadlines and budgets are set and might include conceptual adjustments when the scope of the project starts to exceed feasibility limits. Once all the necessary information is collected it’s put into an initial specification that serves as the project guide for all other aspects of development.
Read: Improve Your Customer Experience With Reliable Flutter App Development
Design
When the development team is fully aware of the scope, purpose, and requirements that have been set for them it’s time to get to work. Engineers will have to make critical decisions on how to construct the app while taking the outlined requirements and budget into consideration. Everything from the future impact of technology choices to integration with existing infrastructure must be taken into account.
For instance, when choosing a web framework they might initially gravitate toward something simple like Ruby on Rails, but eventually choose ASP.NET for its speed and scalability. There are no right or wrong choices here and the exact stack will depend entirely on the purpose of the solution.
Implementation and Testing
Having outlined the scope and chosen the stack, the development team will begin actually coding the final solution. Different tasks are broken up and distributed to different developers for efficiency before coming together into a usable package. Usually, the testing and implementation phases overlap at least a little bit. It’s easier to test smaller chunks of code during development and bugs can be caught earlier, ensuring adherence to deadlines.
Once the final product is somewhat cohesive, a more comprehensive testing phase can begin. This is where QA starts to use a mixture of automated and manual testing to find bugs and inconsistencies in the software so the developers can polish up their code before release.
Deployment
Finally, after rigorous testing, you have a polished first iteration of your product that can be deployed. This is when the latest functional build of your software can be moved from the developer environment, where the code is actively being altered, to the production environment, where stable versions of the software become accessible to end users.
Upkeep
You must keep in mind that software development can be finicky and testing can’t always catch every little detail, so be ready to deal with a few day-one bugs. Thankfully, they’re rarely critical and are often resolved within a few hours of being found.
Since your software is now fully in use, you can start collecting data on performance, key elements, user preferences, and other useful topics that will help you improve it in later releases.
The whole feedback loop can be taken one step further with the implementation of tools like Hotjar. You’ll be able to run questionnaires on the website and get detailed insights into user behavior, allowing you to better grasp what works and what doesn’t.
Documentation
As your software moves along the product lifecycle, it changes a lot. New features get added, redundant functionality is removed, and code is constantly revised to ensure stable performance.
New members of the development team will have to familiarize themselves with the makeup of the product and understand the caveats of different codependencies that it’s built on.
Without clear, concise, and informative internal documentation they’ll need to constantly ask senior team members for explanations, and will take much longer to become fully effective.
Keeping records in tools like Confluence will allow your engineers to easily understand the overall framework and individual elements that comprise your application and ensure that the continued upkeep of your app is as simple as possible.
Conclusion
Software development might seem complicated on the surface but the overall outline is not that difficult to grasp. Following these simple procedures will ensure that your business software development journey goes according to plan and your enterprise sees tangible growth as a result.
