Software Development Lifecycle

by Stella Murugesan Digital Marketing Analyst

Software companies in order to fulfil high-quality solutions and organize software development in an efficient and cost-effective way divide the overall process into several stages, which embrace a software development lifecycle. The lack of well-structured organization will result in extra costs, required for accomplishing a software development project, while the QA outsourcing company will fail to meet the deadlines and the budget set by its customers.

Therefore, any top-flight outcome of a great software idea requires a well-organized software development process – a software development lifecycle. A software development lifecycle embraces all the stages, connected with putting an idea into practice

What are the key stages of any software development lifecycle?

Writing requirements. This stage of a software development lifecycle is aimed at compiling all the information about application functionality into a coherent and articulate set of requirements, which will describe what tasks the software actually performs. The requirements gathering process involves communication with managers, customers and sometimes end-users. After gathering functional requirements for presentation, business logic and data layers the work on the software project is passed on to software architects, who will be tasked with software design.
Software design. This stage of a software development lifecycle comprises the process of interpreting requirements set on the previous stage into software architecture, defining how the application will carry out the tasks and what software technologies and tools are to be used for a successful outcome of the software project. Hence, the requirements are represented in a comprehensible way for software developers to set about implementing the software solution.
Software implementation. The implementation stage of a software development lifecycle starts when software developers get the baseline for their work on the project, which is provided by software architects. Software developers are tasked with coding the requirements of software design and the result of their work proceeds to the next stage of verification and alpha testing.
Software testing. This lifecycle stage involves the efforts of software testers, quality “guards” of a software development company. Testing is often closely interrelated with other stages of a software development lifecycle as the project is checked against the requirements, verification often involves unit testing during the implementation and the solution is being checked for complying with functionality requirements and other features essential for high quality of the software product.
Software deployment and release. This is the lifecycle stage when the software product after being eventually approved is ready for release.

The above mentioned stages of a software development lifecycle are represented in a schematic way and in practice they may be overlapped and interrelated according to the project requirements and goals, thus, software development companies choose a model suitable for them in order to provide state-of-the-art software products in an efficient and cost-effective way.