Design, Production, Testing: All The Steps To A Good Product
No modern enterprise, be it a business company, hospital, busy restaurant or an educational establishment, can survive without reliance on high-quality software products. Without the correct customized software, the running of any organization becomes a burdensome issue. The software helps automate common but monotone tasks people do every day, and as a result, helps users save time and concentrate on solving more important problems. Making a product Software is the sum total of all actions and processes that lead to creating a software product. The process can be very short or very complicated, spanning weeks or even months, depending on the scope of the project, the complexity of goals set and the number of tasks to perform. This article will cover all the important product phases and explain them in great detail!
The best way to start is to map your product as milestones on a continuum. Some people call it a product roadmap. It has one starting point and multiple ending points. That’s the only sure thing you have at your disposal. Each of these points needs clear definitions (aka requirements). You’re trying to get somewhere with this map. The better your definitions, the easier it will be to get you to your destination. Your map should be:
- Design
- Production
- Testing
Design
When a software project is started from scratch, creating the design is the most obvious first of the product phases. Design allows not only finding out how the software product is going to look but also allows both software owners and developers to realize how it’s going to function. Therefore a software design must combine functionality, informativeness, and simplicity so that even a child could use the app without the need to learn. That’s what makes up an intuitive app design. That’s where you can start from.
Just as you have selected a software developer, their team has to make estimations of the project. There must be something to facilitate and substantiate these estimations, and a pure idea isn’t likely to be enough – in fact, any idea by itself is not enough. And here design comes as the first step – a reliable way to make things more precise and analyze the software project. Having created the design, software developers are enabled to make up more detailed project estimation. That’s why design is suggested as the first stage of software development.
The Design product phases usually comprises 3 stages:
1) Brainstorm. That’s usually between you, the project manager and the designer. Together you discuss the software project, bring suggestions and ideas to make a clear concept of the application. In the end, you extract the best ideas to start with.
2) Creating a wireframe. A wireframe of your software shows its main elements (for example, buttons) in their places. You arrange a wireframe the way you want it to look. You get feedback from the designer on the technical aspects of the design and eventually choose the best variant of the wireframe.
3) Then comes the design itself. Design brings every detail onto the wireframe – colors, shades, textures, effects, animations etc. The result is a clickable prototype, a screen flow – a clear vision of your software product.
Once the analysis is complete, the step of designing takes over, which is basically building the architecture of the project. This step helps remove possible flaws by setting a standard and attempting to stick to it.
Production
The software is the essential key to enable the working of any computer system and would be the second of the product phases. Creating software involves using the right programming language that will enable the hardware to work efficiently, thus achieving the goals that are assigned to it.
Creating software involves various phases or cycles which are called Software Development Life Cycles. Software Development Life Cycles enables the software engineer, client, tester and consumer to configure in the right kind of software that is needed for a particular purpose. A software can be created for various services which include; insurance, banking, tourism, hotel management and other important industries.
Testing
The testing stage is the last of the product phases and it assesses the software for errors and documents bugs if there are any. The software is tested for any fault in order to ensure quality.
In conclusion, once the software passes through all the stages without any issues, it is to undergo a maintenance process wherein it will be maintained and upgraded from time to time to adapt to changes. Almost every developer follows all the three steps, leading to the fullest of the production process.
Photo Credit : Production / Vic / CC BY