Software Development Lifecycle
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.
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