Understanding the Custom Software Development Lifecycle

Startups and business owners have an inherent need to adapt and understand technology. Delving into custom software development for your business idea can be daunting, especially for someone who is not familiar with the software development process. That’s where the Custom Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) comes through.

SDLC acts as a simplified blueprint for developers and business owners that they can follow to get optimal results for their custom software development. It’s a structured approach to software development, incorporating several carefully planned phases to ensure that all user requirements are fulfilled as needed. Let’s take a look at the different phases of SDLC.

Phases of Custom Software Development Lifecycle

Custom Software Development Lifecycle is a highly calculated process, and its different phases are meant to help businesses and developers create software with the minimum margin of error. This systematic approach helps software development by saving time and resources, and by ensuring that the final product is the best it can be.

Custom SDLC consists of 7 phases, with each phase having its own goals and objectives that feed into the next phase, thus ensuring a highly productive development process.

1. Planning

Every software solution starts with an idea. But coming up with the idea is just the start; planning how to execute your idea through a properly thought-out strategy is what this phase is mostly about. This phase of the SDLC involves a lot of brainstorming, deciding the project duration, managing expectations, and cost evaluation.

2. Defining Requirements

This phase is a direct follow-up to the planning phase. In this phase, the developers do a feasibility analysis by getting requirements from the client, analyzing those requirements, and then properly documenting the client’s requirements and the developers’ solutions.

According to a 2015 survey from Statista, the leading cause of software development failure was found to be the poor documentation of requirements.

3. Designing

This is where the software architects come in the software development process. During this stage, the developers and architects create their software design based on the requirements acquired in the previous phase. This phase will also determine how the UI will look and on which platforms the software will be made available. Usually, prototypes are also developed during this phase.

4. Coding & Development

This is the most crucial part of the Custom Software Development Lifecycle. Depending on the size of the project, a single developer or a team of developers will start coding the software according to the requirements and designs submitted during the design phase. This process takes longer than other phases in the development process.

5. Testing

After the developers have delivered a source code according to the requirements and design documents, that source code has to be tested before proceeding further. During this phase, the testers thoroughly check the software for security, performance, and quality. These testers employ all kinds of methodologies to check for any issues in the coding.

6. Deployment

After the product has been tested and all the remaining issues have been resolved, it is then time to release the software to the end-user. This process can be done in two ways: A full release or a phased release. How a company chooses to release its software depends on different factors, like the nature and size of its user base, the type of software, and the client's objectives.

7. Operating and Maintenance

The job doesn’t end with the software release. The next phase, operating and maintenance, is just as important for the whole process. This phase usually involves users reporting bugs that were missed during the testing phase and the development team fixing these bugs. However, this phase is not only about fixing reported bugs; the dev team is also going to regularly update the software for the constantly changing business needs and do performance tweaks.

Conclusion

Custom Software Development Lifecycle is a necessary roadmap for the development process. Take the analogy of building a house; if there are no house plans, no set budget, and no defined process, then the building construction is bound to fail. The same is the case with building a software product. Without a well-defined route, the development process can become long, expensive, and tedious, and even a little error can bring the whole process crumbling down like a house of cards.

So, it is always a good idea to invest in a custom software development team that understands and adheres to a well-crafted SDLC, making your life easy and ensuring an end product of higher quality.