The planned and organized development of a software product is called Software Developement. Often Software Developeement is used synonymously with Programming, but it’s only a part of the work of Software Developement, where planning, timing, designing and distributing are also important parts of developing software.
Overview and Creation of Software Developement
The term of Software Developement allows for different approches in matter of organization. One company might go a structered and organized way developing software, others may follow a more evolving-by-developing mantra. While developing software also deals with finances, markting and co. a company and/or it’s developers have to deal with more then just the development aspect of their work.
Over time different stages evolved while developing software. Starting at performing market researches and gathering ideas and concepts requirements are determined describing initial solutions. After that the problem and concept(s) are analyzed which leads into creating a concrete plan or design concept abstracting the ordered task for a product into it’s software-based solution.
Starting the actual programming
After that is done the actual programming (or: coding) starts and the software is being implemented. When this is done the software is tested for all features and functions, also a documentation is created. If it’s stable enough and finished it’s released either directly through the developement company or in assocation with a so called Publisher. Work and design on the software doesn’t end with the release in most cases, the majority of developers debug and maintain their work through patches and updates.
This is no restricted order but time has shown that it’s (one of) the best structured orders of events when dealing with developing software. The overall process depends on the difficulty of the main problem or task the software has to solve and the costumers own perceptions on how to deal with the issue and his ideas concerning the software concept.