What are the 3 Stages of Software Development?

The industry's primary goal is to produce high-quality SaaS software in the shortest time possible. Most organizations use a five-stage software design lifecycle (SDLC). This allows teams to be high-quality and detect issues before release.

However, many people view these goals as in conflict with one another. It is not possible to make reliable and high-quality software quickly. If you prefer speed, there will be more failures and outages.

 

These competing pressures have been managed over the past 20 years by using a development lifecycle from testing to integration to staging and production.

Development and production are the two most critical phases of the life cycle. The application's life cycle begins with development. Production is the actual place it lives. Software development services must focus on the two main stages of the life cycle. This will allow applications to move from one stage to the next as efficiently and quickly as possible. The five-stage software lifecycle emphasizes an application's development, integration, testing, and staging. This lifecycle is also slower and more likely to make mistakes than modern cloud-native approaches. That's precisely what we want.

 

Three Phases of the Application Development Process

SaaS development services are very time-consuming and tedious. Depending on the software life cycle model you use to develop your application, there will be different phases of development. There are three main models currently in use: the RAD (Rapid Application Development) Model, the Waterfall Model, and the Prototype Model. No matter which model you choose, the three main phases of the application development phase remain the same. Even though a model may not indicate these phases, it's recommended that you go through them to get the best results.

 

The 3 Most Important Phases

The hyped-important phases are listed below. These phases were easy to understand because I used relevant examples whenever possible. I hope that you have come to understand the importance and will pass the knowledge on to others.

Requirements & Planning:

This is the first phase. You gather the customer's requirements and create a plan to fulfill them. This is my favorite phase. This is an excellent thing to work on if you have the proper requirements. Let's say you were asked to apply for a job at a company. The software development company asks you to apply for a salary roll. It isn't straightforward to determine the company's exact requirements if it only tells you this. Creating the application would be easier if the company told you more details about the project.

 

Design and Implementation:

This is the next step. This part involves all of the UI design for the application. Once the UI has been completed, you can start to add the code to the application. Keep these tips in mind when coding your application. You can reduce the number of variables and reuse code whenever possible.

 

Testing:

 This is the last phase. The testing phase is the most challenging part of developing an application. Although it may not seem like it now, it will become a long one once you get to it. You must test the application for all inputs and operations during the testing phase. You should immediately return to the previous phase if you find an error. After fixing the error, go back through the whole testing phase. Sometimes, fixing an error can cause another error in the code.

 

What happens in a production-like environment?

Once we are in the production-like mode, it's time to verify all configurations and environmental factors. Make sure everything works with dependencies.

Cloud computing services should be treated in a production-like environment as first-class citizens. This is not how continuous integration currently works. The production-like phase should be about how requests move between services and how interactions can be managed. It is not enough to focus on whether or not the code has been solid.

 

Improve Developer Confidence Through Change Validation

While no one wants to see the flaws in their code, developers don't mind running tests. This applies whether they are writing manual or automated tests. Developers shouldn't be required to send their code to a testing environment to determine if it works. They don't need to worry about embarrassment if a colleague finds an error.

 

Robust change validation allows developers to spot possible errors before the update or application leaves the local environment. Validating changes requires more than checking that the code works with all dependencies. If a change is not validated, the developer will know immediately and can correct the issue. When a change has been validated, the developer can confidently push it into a production-like environment, knowing that it has been tested against downstream and upstream dependencies and won't break unintentionally.

 

Developers must ship with maximum confidence by ensuring as much development environment hardening as possible. Before the code can be moved from development to production-like, it is checked with a change validation tool. This allows it to verify that it works with all dependencies.

 

Rethinking the phases

In an ideal world, all software would be ready for production before it left the local developer's computer. It is sensible to create an intermediate step between production and development to allow the application to be reviewed by someone else before it goes into production. This step does not need to be separated into three environments. One environment should suffice. This environment should be called "production-like," as it will make the software development lifecycle development production-like.

 

This is possible by ensuring developers have the tools they need to test their applications. Also, the intermediate and developer environments are as close to production environments as possible. It is essential that developers can test for all possible problems so that the software development company can handle tests that are impossible to do by developers. This includes involving production data, testing load, and ensuring correct configurations.

Conclusion

It is possible to reduce the distance between production and development, which can help improve development velocity while reducing failure rates. Contact us for more information related to micro SaaS. This is possible by moving to a three-stage software development lifecycle. This also gives developers greater control over their services' testing and hardening, which increases their confidence in shipping.