Planning —
in this phase, you are conducting thorough research on the product you are planning to develop. You are then discussing your plans with clients and stakeholders. You are also identifying the pros and cons of the current software methods you are using. This way, you can double down on the pros and reduce the cons to a minimum. One way to make sure planning is going efficiently is to check for the customer or client’s feedback. Feedback should include surveys, interviews, questionnaires, quizzes, and more. It’s super important to know what your customers want so that you can build it for them. In the end, you are not going to make a profit if you don’t deliver the product your customers truly desire.
Requirements Analysis —
Once research is completed you can proceed forward to creating an SRS (Software Requirements Specification) document. In this document, you are going to describe all the product’s features. Then you are going to present the SRS doc to the stakeholders so that they can either accept it or reject it. It depends on the time and financial constraints.
Design —
Once the SRS doc is completed, your team, specifically the product architects, will create another document — the DDS (Design Document Specification). In the DDS, you’ll have your features thoroughly described. Inside the document, you’ll also have the budget and time estimates required for the product to be completed successfully. You’ll basically have everything your developers need to start working on the actual product.
Implementation / Development —
The implementation phase in SDLC typically takes the longest period of time as it involves the actual development of the product. Your developers will work on creating a product based on the DDS.They must also select the most appropriate coding language for the type of software you are building. It’s vital to notice that the communication between your team at this phase must be effective and accurate. That’s because your developers will need to communicate with the QA (quality assurance) testers, the product and project managers. This will help them in developing a product your customers will genuinely enjoy. Since DevOps is becoming popular lately, developers are starting to broaden their coding skills. This makes them responsible for a large part of the entire software development life cycle process including the testing stage.
Testing —
Once the product is developed, the software development life cycle testing phase follows. Here, the QA testers have to go through the codebase in order to find bugs and errors. If issues are reported, the product is turned back to the developers for them to rectify the flaws and roll it out again. This phase repeats until the product becomes flawless.
Deployment —
Once all the errors are removed, the product is rolled out to the market automatically. This is the step that I am currently in on a project I’ve been working on for a bit.
Maintenance and improvement —
After deployment, you should observe how the market reacts to your product. Then based on the feedback you receive, you create reports on what needs to be improved.
“Do you need to upgrade the software version? Do you need to add more features? Do you need to make the interface simpler and more intuitive?” And so on.
This is about all of the steps but revisions and changes can also be done using these steps. Thanks for reading and I hope this helps structure project time management like it’s done for me! You can find more info on this process here where it goes in further depth.