Software development is a process through which a particular software product is developed. The whole process is followed to come up with the desired software and this process can also be termed as the software lifecycle.
Software development life cycle is basically a process which is adapted and followed during the development of software. There are certain basic steps which are followed for any software development. The few stages of software development lifecycle are as follows:
Requirement analysis
The first important step is to get acquainted with the specific requirements of the desired software. This requires experience and skill in software engineering so that the right software is developed.
Specification analysis
Once the deliverables are worked out, a software development process enters into the specification stage. This is the stage when the software is written and described to understand it properly. Specifications are considered as most important for the purpose of external interfaces which must remain stable.
Architectural analysis
Architecture refers to a theoretical representation of the software system. A well-defined architecture makes sure that the software has fulfilled all its needs to meet the requirements and accommodate future requirements if any. The architecture step also deals with interfaces between the software system and other products of software, including the underlying hardware or the host operating system.
Coding
The coding stage is a commonly followed step in software development. For better understandability, here the design is reduced to code.
Testing
The coding stage is followed by the testing phase. This is considered as the most important stage of every software development life cycle where extensive testing is done to make sure that the coding done by different developers of software work together in harmony.
Documentation
Documentation is also considered as an important part of software development. Many a times this step is ignored, only to end up in problems whenever future additions and maintenance are a necessity.
In the meantime, many software projects are get failed because of lack of training amongst end users. Preferably, training is considered as an important part of the software development life cycle where end users have all their doubts solved by the developers.
Previously, the whole process of software development consisted of only a developer writing the software code. However, today situation is quite complicated, big and involves teams of analysts, architects, testers, programmers and users who work in tandem to generate codes. This is the main reason why software development lifecycle has turn out to be such important. Thus, software often fails or lacks performance if the development lifecycle is not well-defined.