There are a number of steps that we need to do to ensure the success of our software development project.
- Visualization: Visualization is a proper part of development project and it should allow us to work on the colors, styles and other visual elements. At this stage, everything could be performed based on clients’ preferences and various market preferences. Clients should be provided with different variants of screens and they approve any screen that would be used on the actual software. Designers would make any necessary adjustments and when the mock-ups are ready, it is time to prepare for the implementation. Any change in chartflow and functionality would become less efficient and significantly costlier from this moment on, so developers need to notify clients about this.
- Initial implementation: This is the stage when the development team and client start the mock-up implementation. They should have a more realistic estimation for testing and development. It is often necessary to do things iteration by iteration until the entire team could come up with the proper designs. Costs of changes are quite high by this stage, so it is imperative to have an excellent accuracy of the estimations. The development works are divided into separate tasks and they can be parallelized to improve the overall efficiency. There should be clear plans for each task and solutions for them are selected quickly. The development should be able to make the final refinement of their estimations for development. They should understand fully how the project is going to proceeed and how things must be implemented.
- Iterations: A successful software development project should be based on iterational development style. Although there shouldn’t be major changes at this stage, the team can be more flexible and adaptive. It would be easy for them to produce more viable products with higher overall quality. This is particularly crucial for start-ups that need to have more successful projects from the very start to better establish their reputation in the competitive market. Each iteration should be based on more concrete results that really indicate progresses. After each project milestones, clients should receive reports. An agile development project should do a good job in properly responding to any changes in requirements. All requirements should be checked constantly for relevance and in case of need, documentation should be updated. We should be aware that these changes could vary and it may be impossible to generalize the whole thing.
- Deployment and Post-Release Services: This should be the final step and it often concerns about the final testing. It should be noted that clients pay for the source code and it is their property, as well as all the documentation and software in its final, usable form. Often, this isn’t the end of the collaboration between the development team and the client. They could discuss about any new opportunity and further works. Clients will still need maintenance and support for their software. New bugs could be discovered and new feature additions could be required.