How to Develop a Software from Scratch?
How to build a software application from scratch, steps, cost of development? Every company needs and uses software to drive success. As a business owner, you might be toying with the idea of creating software, but there’s a lot you need to know beforehand.
You might have heard of different development tools and programming languages, but do you know which one to choose to build successful software? One of the biggest problems for startups or anyone new in the market is understanding the process of software development.
To help you out, this article will cover everything you need to know about building software. So, without further ado, let’s get started!
Software Development Process from Scratch: Step-by-Step Guide
Below we have described 7 steps for building a software application from scratch.
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Brainstorming
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Software Planning
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Designing
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Software Architecture
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Coding
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Quality Assurance (Testing)
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Deployment and Maintenance
Software development process involves creating computer programs and applications that perform specific tasks. The process of software development involves various stages, including planning, design, coding, testing, and maintenance.
Brainstorming
The first step for creating software is to start brainstorming with stakeholders and analyze the competitors. By analyzing competitors, we refer to analyzing their pricing model, product features, customer feedback, customer acquisition strategies, drawbacks, and product efficiencies.
Read: What is Software Development
Once done with competitor analysis, identify your targeted audience, define your unique selling proposition (USP), specify customer acquisition, software monetization model, and define challenges that can slow down your business in the market.
Software Planning
After brainstorming, the next step is software development planning. All you need to do here is define software requirements and share them with the development team (on-premise or outsourced).
Read: Top 10 Software Development Trends
After that, the development team will define the software modules, data and process flow, and project roadmap to follow. Also, you need to conduct a cost-benefit analysis by calculating ROI.
Designing
It refers to describing the UI/UX of the software. To ensure that you come up with the best UI/UX design, you need to understand the mindset of your target audience, define the system response upon different actions, determine a user-friendly appearance, create wireframes to demonstrate basic layout and functionalities, combine wireframes into UX prototype, and transform prototypes into full-graphic interfaces.
Software Architecture
Now comes the most crucial part of software development - choosing the ideal software architecture. With multiple architectures to choose from, including Layered, Monolithic, Event-driven, Microservices, Service-Oriented, Microkernel, etc., it can be confusing to find the one that meets your unique needs.
Read: Software Architect Roadmap 2023
But based on the detailed description of the functional modules, and integration approaches (middleware-based, SaaS, point-to-point, iPaaS, etc.), you can decide what’s best.
Once you have decided on the software architecture, another essential step is to choose the tech stack for software development that consists of DBMS, front-end programming language, back-end programming language, IDEs, version control systems, etc.
Coding
Once you have decided on the software architecture and the tech stack to be used for the software, comes the crucial part - coding. To create efficient software, you need to hire developers with years of experience and knowledge.
They will help you with writing server-side, and client-side code, and APIs while establishing development and delivery automation environments.
Quality Assurance (Testing)
While writing the source code of the software, project managers along with developers need to create test cases and automated test scripts to carry out performance, functionality, security, and integration tests. These tests help in detecting and fixing bugs and errors so that the software works as expected.
Deployment and Maintenance
Last but not least, after the first version of the software is ready, it gets deployed in the production environment and made available for the users. After the deployment, users are more likely to point out bugs, allowing you to improve the software and add new features.
Key Roles of Software Development Team
What are the key roles of a software development team?
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Project Manager
A project manager is responsible for planning, monitoring, and delivering the project on time. From breaking a development project into smaller tasks, defining milestones, identifying project dependencies, directing the team towards goals, prioritizing tasks, managing resources, and deploying deliverables to monitoring progress, tracking challenges, conducting regular meetings, coordinating with the clients, project managers need to take care of the completing of the project.
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UI/UX Designer
User Interface and User Experience (UI/UX) designers are responsible for gathering user requirements, illustrating design ideas, designing UI elements, creating navigation buttons, developing UI prototypes, identifying UX problems, conducting layout adjustments, and adhering to style guidelines.
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Frontend Developer
You need a front-end developer to create user-friendly web pages using programming languages like HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, and Bootstrap. They also optimize the software to load instantly, maintain and improve the software, collaborate with backend developers to improve usability, create quality mockups, conduct usability tests, etc.
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Backend Developer
A backend developer is responsible for writing server-side code and APIs. Their main role is to create, manage, test, and debug application logic, APIs, databases, integrate data, and other behind the scene processes.
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DevOps Engineer
Another essential part of the software development team is the DevOps engineer. Their responsibilities involve managing servers, deploying updates, providing level 2 tech support, integrating infrastructure as code approach, establishing CI/CD pipelines, maintaining containers and orchestration, and performing root cause analysis to resolve production errors.
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Quality Assurance Engineer
To test the entire software, quality assurance engineers are crucial. They design and plan test strategies, choose testing tools, conduct or automate testing processes, track test results, and report bugs.
Software Development Models Based on Sourcing
Although now you understand the crucial roles in the software development life cycle, do you know which sourcing model to go for? If your answer is NO, then here are the two most common approaches to sourcing a development team.
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In-House Software Development Team
It refers to hiring in-house developers, training them, and using their skills to create software for your business.
While you can directly supervise the productivity of your team, it can be expensive as it requires investing a lot of money on things like employee training, purchasing equipment, office rent, etc.
Also, it requires you to hire great talents for different roles as mentioned in the above section but it can lead to a slow launch as the entire team needs to get familiar with the working style of each other before working as a team to ensure there are no mishaps.
Another most popular and highly preferable method of software development is outsourcing. It is the process of hiring a third-party development team without investing a lot of money.
Outsourcing allows you to access top talents around the world, reduces management efforts, and achieves fast delivery of the software project.
Also, outsourcing companies like Decipher Zone Technologies where the vendor takes full responsibility for the team management, risk management, and quality of the deliverables, keep you stress-free.
Cost of Building a Software Application From Scratch
The cost of building software can range anywhere from $50,000 to $450,000. Software type, features, application logic, workflow complexities, third-party system integrations, availability, performance, security, and scalability are some of the major factors that play a crucial role in determining the software development cost.
Conclusion
At first, developing software for your business might seem daunting, but gathering requirements, proper planning, and hiring experienced developers can help you deliver a successful project.
So that was all about how to develop software from scratch. We hope you find the article helpful for your future projects.
Want to know the exact cost to develop software for your business? Get in touch with our experts and receive a customized quote to hire an experienced development team now!
FAQs
What are the steps to develop software?
Developing software requires the following steps:
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Brainstorming
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Software Planning
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Designing
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Choosing Software Architecture
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Coding
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Testing
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Deploying and Maintaining
Which language is used to build a software application?
For frontend development, you can go with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and their frameworks (Vue, Angular, React, etc.).
While Java, PHP, Ruby, Python, and C# are some of the languages to choose for backend development.
How much does it cost to build a software application?
The cost of building software can range anywhere from $50,000 to $450,000 depending on its features, complexity, and other requirements.
