Tips for Best Practices in Your Software Development Cycle

In this post you can find out what are the best practices for your software development process. Now question arise what do you mean by Software Development practices. Do you know what they are? Do you make use of them in your everyday application development?



Why is so much software developed unsystematically? Why are best practises in this field ignored? In this post, I first want to give explanation the traditional view for the need of software development process. This is not a big surprise. So why much software’s are still developed unsystematically, either without a process or with disregard to best practises.



What is an exact Software Development Process?

It cannot be stated too often that if you are developing software, you need a process. By process, I mean a guideline description of a repeatable procedure that both describes and prescribe the way that your organization develops software. It describes only the process because the process that works best for your organization is different to the process that works best for another organization. So the process says a bit about how your organization works. It prescribes the way that your organization develops software because it is the process that will be applied to the development of future projects as well.

It is not sufficient just to say that the process is simply:

Cycle 1 >Requirements->

            Analysis->

            Design->

            Implementation->

            Testing->

            Documentation->

            Maintenance

Cycle 2 >Requirements->

            Analysis->

            Design->

            Implementation->

            Testing->

            Documentation->

            Maintenance

And so on.

As this leaves far too many questions open to explanation by customers, managers, and developers alike. For example, what kinds of requirements are gathered in the first Cycle? How detailed is this analysis? Does the design phase wait until the requirements phase is completed before it starts? And many more questions.

 Of course, every association will have its own answers to these and other questions. The answers to such questions should be record in several sort of a document; say a process instruction manual. Then, if a potential customer asks the question "How do you develop software?" etc etc, you can then demonstrate not only that you have thought about it, but that you have a well documented, professional way that works for your association.

Different organizations have different requirements for their processes, so there is not one "correct" process. The developers also need to believe in the process so that they can work together as a team, respecting the boundaries between different parts of the process and the implications of the process on their roles in the overall development.