How to Create Software: Key Tasks, Roles, Cost Factors

How to Create Software: Key Tasks, Roles, Cost Factors 

How to Develop Your Own Software Product: Summary

    Software ideation, planning, designing the architecture, UX and UI, coding, testing, and deployment are all parts of the software development process. This procedure can take just 2–6 months if the lean workable version (MVP) is initially created.

    A project manager, a business analyst, UX and UI designers, front-end and back-end developers, QA and DevOps engineers, and others are needed on a team developing software. Additional skills, such as those of data scientists and 3D designers, may be necessary depending on the nature of the project.

    ScienceSoft has been assisting in the design and construction of profitable software products in a timely and cost-effective manner since 1989.

Step-by-Step Software Development Process

The typical procedures that taken to finish application development projects are detailed below. If you decide to create an MVP, you can omit some of the responsibilities. Additionally, different techniques for development (such as Scrum, Kanban, Waterfall, V-model, etc.) handle these tasks in different ways; they can either be carried out sequentially or iteratively in parallel.

Step-1 Creating a product concept.

Duration: 3 months

 locating the target market, comprehending and evaluating their needs and desires.

comparison of similar software products (analysis of competitor product features, pricing & monetization models, customer feedback, etc).

the conception of a software product.

defining strategies for customer acquisition, conversion, and retention.

defining the model for monetizing software.

Step 2. Software planning

Duration:  1 month.

• Defining and prioritizing detailed software features.
• Creating a software requirements specification.
• High-level software design:
  • App type/types (mobile, web, desktop).
  • Describing a list of software modules to build and specifying what functionality area each module covers and how the modules should interact.
• Describing data and process flows between the target software and other existing software, planning integrations.
• Creating the software development project roadmap with major milestones.
• Drawing up a business case: conducting cost-benefit analysis, calculating NVP, ROI.

• Step 3. UX design

  Duration:  1 month.

  • Conducting UX research to understand the mental models of the target audience.(UX design stands for User Experience design and tends to be the invisible or “behind the scenes” side of design. It's all the work that goes into creating an app, website, software, or service.)
  • Describing how a user will interact with the software product (e.g., what system response the user gets upon different actions).
  • Creating wireframes(Wireframes are simple block diagrams that show the placement of elements in a user interface and demonstrate the intended layout and functionality of a solution) that demonstrate basic functionality and content layout on each screen.
  • Combining wireframes into a dynamic UX prototype of the application.
  • Performing the prototype user testing.

  • Step 4. UI design

    Duration: 1 month.

    • Deciding on the appearance of user-facing software parts (choosing a color scheme, icons for the buttons, menus, tabs and screen layouts of the application’s GUI).

    • Transforming software prototypes into full-color graphic interface mockups.

    • Creating a UI kit for the quick development of user interfaces.

    • Step 5. Software Architecture Design

      Duration: ~ 2 weeks.

      • Detailed description of how functional modules of future software should work at the code level.
      • Detailed database design.
      • Defining integration approaches (point-to-point, middleware-based, iPaaS, etc.) between the different functionality modules.
      • Choosing the technology stack for the future software back end and front end.

      • Step 6. Coding

        Duration: 6 months to deliver the first working version.

      • Establishing development and delivery automation environments (CI/CD, container orchestration, etc.).(CI and CD stand for continuous integration and continuous delivery/continuous deployment. In very simple terms, CI is a modern software development practice in which incremental code changes are made frequently and reliably.)

      • Writing server-side code and APIs.
      • Turning static user interface mockups provided by UI designers into the fully functional GUI.
      • Conducting unit testing and static code analysis (by developers).
      • (How to build software faster and at a lower cost?
      • 
        
        • Choose the technology platform (it will include a programming language and frameworks, architecture patterns, APIs, and more) based on a careful preliminary analysis of options. The development speed may differ 2 – 20 times.
        • Use cloud services (messaging services, analytics and AI services, image processing services, etc.) by well-established cloud providers, e.g., Azure and AWS.)
        • Use trusted open-source tools and APIs.

        Step 7. Testing

      • Duration: ~30% of the project time (depends heavily on software complexity, security and compliance requirements, the level of test automation, and more).

        • Creating a test plan with a testing scope, test types addressing all functional and non-functional software requirements, reporting procedures, etc.
        • Creating test cases and checklists.
        • Writing and running automated test scripts (API and UI tests).
        • Carrying out functionality, performance, security, integration testing.
        • Fixing bugs detected by testing.