In the world of information technology and day-to-day business operations, we, the people, rely on a lot of processes for the fulfillment of our various activities and transactional associations.
While numerous processes are relied on by the various associated entities, in the field of information technology, the software development process is at the top-most or forms the base of all the subsequent processes.
The software development process, as a generality, refers to the core processes used for the analysis, planning, preparation, implementation, testing, support, etc. forms of activities that are used by dedicated professionals (whether represented by an organization or a group of individuals) or freelancers (groups or individuals).
Simply put, the process encompassing the software development activity done by any individual, group of individuals, or organization is loosely referred to as the software development process.
Following are some of the key concepts about the software development process:
1.) Analysis.
2.) Design.
3.) Software Product Development
4.) Quality-Oriented Feature Testing and Resolution of Issues
5.) Promotion (optional)
6.) Installation or configuration on the server (and Integration <-Optional).
7.) Maintenance, i.e., feature addition and update.
The earliest roots of the Software Development Process as a methodology to build software products were born in the 1960s and have been ongoing since.
It also provides various conventions, like SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle), which define multiple techniques to ease the development and deployment of professional and large-scale software products and instances.
That is, it makes the process of software development more manageable by defining various states for the process of software development.
Due to its primary roots in computing devices, software development has historically been done on computers and deployed on computers.
However, in today's modern world, the most common form of communication across distances, the telephone, has received a boost with the era of smart phones, i.e., handheld or even wearable phones and devices with processing power equivalent to some of the yesteryear micro-computers and even supercomputers.
So nowadays, while the software development process is still reliant on computers, it is more likely than not that the final target user will be using the developed software product on some handheld or similar smart device, which means there is absolutely a requirement that the software developer considers the flexibility that such a scenario requires.
So, using the Agile methodology enables the software development process to unburden the developer while allowing for the appropriate usage of the end software product on several smart devices.
There are also other various methodologies of the software development process, like waterfall, spiral development, prototyping, incremental and iterative, rapid application development, and extreme programming; all such methods are used on a case-by-case basis by the team or entity doing the development based on consideration of their respective advantages.
