# Development

Steps for Effective Software Product Development

Red Rocket teamAug 21, 20246 min read

Nowadays, having own website, application or enterprise software for business is not a desire, but a necessary thing. Most of the sales in various fields of business are made through the Internet, mobile and computer devices. That's why you should definitely consider creating software that will give you a competitive advantage over other players in your niche.

However, popular questions that business owners wonder about include how to start a software development project, what tools are needed, what are the steps of developing a digital product and much more. If you don't have enough experience, it's better not to try to create software for business without a step by step software guide. In this case, you are likely to lose your time and investment.

There is a solution - read the detailed guide that consists of 10 obligatory steps to create a digital product. Obviously, every business is different, and many of the details will vary. However, we at Red Rocket Software have created a «skeleton» that you should use during the development process, adding your own ideas to it. Read on to learn the steps involved in program development.

Steps for Effective Software Product Development

1. Conducting an In-Depth Analysis

Any software development build process starts when a company feels the need to get a new website, application, or program. You have to understand what kind of product you want to get as a result. To accomplish this task, experts recommend analyzing various factors in depth.

Analyze your own company. It all starts with understanding who you are and what your company needs. Look at recent statistics, check sales figures and also interview your employees.
Analyze your target audience. Those who have correctly described their target audience are very likely to achieve success in their niche. Moreover, when developing a program, you also need to know who your target customers are.
Analyze the market. Look at how your closest competitors are performing. You should choose 2-3 strong competitors. Check their digital products, how they are implemented, their weaknesses and strengths, and so on.

When you have analyzed all the above facts, it will be easier for you to understand which product you really need. Perhaps you want to create an enterprise task delegation application, but your business still doesn't have an effective e-Commerce website.

2. Choice of Development Service Providers

One of the most strategic and significant steps one can take is to identify their development service provider or team in any software product development process. The kind of developers you hire–their skills, experience, and the approach they adopt, will define the quality of the final product. There are several key factors you should evaluate when selecting a development partner:

Technical skills. Ensure that they have practical experience in developing similar products using the technologies you would wish to adopt. Use previous or existing works and references from former customers.
Communication. Make sure that they employ staff who are fluent in English as this will ensure that they communicate effectively and respond to customer inquiries on time. This level of communication is crucial since it ensures that people are in constant communication.
Costing. The next important factor you should look at to choose a development team is the cost of services. Remember that high cost does not always mean quality and excellent implementation.
Company stability. Conduct research on factors such as period of establishment, clients’ loyalty, and employees’ churn rate. These metrics show whether a company builds share enduring relationships with customers and employees.

When you've settled on a specific team of experts, get to know them. Hold a video meeting to talk in detail about your company and the software you need.

Who Should Be on Your Team?

Another question you need to know the answer to is how do you realize that your development team is fully staffed? Actually, the number of people who help you build software can vary from case to case. They depend on the type of project (website, app, or other software), the scope of the product, and your desires. However, there are some people without whom software development is simply impossible.

Chief Executive Officer.
Project manager.
UX/UI designer.
Programmer.
QA tester.

For a successful operation of a digital product in the future, you need to have other professionals on your team, including a content manager, SEO specialist, translator, designer, and others.

3. Creating the Plan

No software development implementation is possible without creating a step-by-step plan. While it is always advisable to plan before launching any new software product, website, or corporate program, planning is the primary stage. It should therefore be noted that while it may take a considerable amount of time to properly assess an idea and formulate a good plan to begin with, it is money well spent. Since it helps set the right foundation for a project that will help you get to where you want to be in the long haul.

The planning process should start with understanding the problem you want to address or the need that you wish to fulfill with a specific software product. From your own development view and your target customers, outline the goals and the expected functionality. To begin with, study your competitors to learn what existing solutions look like. This will assist in defining the unique selling proposition that differentiates the proposition of your offering.

After that, specify the key characteristics of the application that you are going to develop, the application workflow, and any possible technical conditions and prerequisites. At this conceptual level, do not worry about all the details that are associated with the implementation of an idea. Just think about the intended purpose or use of the concept.

Finally, it will help you set a reasonable estimate of the budget and timeline for when the project will be completed. Include work that is needed for the design, development and testing phase of the project. Another point is to talk to the development team about what approach they use for software development (e.g. Agile or Waterfall). Compare each approach based on the goals, objectives of the project, how complex the scope is, how the team would accept changes etc.

4. Understanding the Required Resources and Tools

It is always important to consider the resources and tools needed for software development before starting any project. It helps ensure that one has a realistic roadmap to follow. The two are time and capital, which are essential in any business venture. It is recommended that the business owners schedule a kick-off meeting with the development team so the team can get an understanding of the goals, features, and functionality the owners have in mind and, in turn, give an assessment of the overall time needed for the development. We also want to emphasize that the underestimation of the time is critical, as it causes more time wasted, frustration, and additional costs.

When it comes to the tools, they should be selected by the business owner but they should consult the development team for the technologies. The programmer is aware which programming languages, frameworks, and development platforms would enable construction to be most efficient, given the project’s aim and size. Tools also have ramifications in terms of cost and schedule, which makes it preferable to stay in comfort zones by utilizing languages and platforms with which the team is familiar.

For example, developing mobile applications for the Android operating system most often requires knowledge of the Java programming language. If we talk about the iOS platform, there are also two main languages used here - Objective C, which is the first language that was developed by Apple to write applications for iOS. And the second language is the more advanced and more modern Swift.

5. Layout Design

When you have already had several meetings with the development team and reached a mutual understanding of how the product development will take place and what the end result will look like, it's time to move on to the design mockup. This process is the responsibility of the UI/UX designer on the team. In the case of layout design, the question is very clear: Is it a significant factor in the success of a possibly user-friendly software product? The initial considerations that should be made when designing are to define your audience and to understand them. Be clear on who will be using your software – their age, technical expertise and the challenges they face you are solving. It informs the choices between content complexity and simplicity and the design of visual elements that would be appreciated most by users.

Structure and navigation. Next is creating an easy-to-understand information structure and navigation. Before designing any hierarchy, it is crucial to consider the primary and secondary features and options that should be attainable at the hierarchy levels.
Call-To-Action buttons. Most importantly, the design must direct user attention to conversion tasks, namely registration, purchase, or content publishing, if any. That's why a good designer always knows how best to implement CTA buttons to attract potential customers for your business.
Additional features. There are many innovative features today that can perfectly complement your website, app, or specialized software. For example, you can add virtual reality capabilities, voice search, and even an AI consultant to replace your support team.

Many entrepreneurs underestimate how an attractive and proper design can influence users. Sometimes it plays a key role in turning a user into your customer. Find out what UI/UX design trends are popular in 2024 to attract more customers.

6. Software Development Implementation

Indeed, it could be argued that the most significant phase of software product development is the construction of the software product. This is the level when the program truly begins to take shape in the hands of competent programmers who are able to take the plans, designs and visions of capabilities and turn them into actually workable codes.

As earlier presented in the description of the roadmap and specifications in this process, developers start developing the architecture, interfaces, features, and integration as described above. It is quite an exhilarating stage, and this is because at this point it is where the software progressively acquires its physical appearance after the initial planning, research and designing stages that may have taken several months.

It is best done incrementally, in a short period of time, possibly in cycles on a schedule of sprints. This enables the development team to receive feedback at a certain frequency or when they deem necessary, make improvements on the end product quality as seen fit.

Is it Important to Have Video Meetings with the Development Team?

Certainly, you should always get feedback from the development team and have regular video meetings. Why is it so? At such meetings, developers will tell you more about what work has been done, what stage of development your product is at now, and what tasks will be performed next. Another question is how often video meetings with developers should be held. Some say that one comprehensive meeting at the end of the work week is enough, while others say that it is better to do video meetings every day in the morning.

Actually, a perfect option is to hold 2-3 video meetings in one working week. This way, you will get all the latest information about the actual tasks that are being performed by the hired team. It is business-critical to have regular interactions with all these parties and stakeholders to ensure that everyone is in harmony and on the right track when it comes to the lengthy process of building software.

7. Finding Potential Errors

Before your finished software product becomes available to a large number of people, you need to be 100% sure that it works the way you planned earlier. That's why, in this step by step software creation guide, we have inserted a testing item. Thorough testing focuses on finding such points:

Coding mistakes. This is where the program produces crashes or does not calculate in the right way and the like. The testers simply have to identify all the runtime faults.
Usability of design and structures. This includes problems such as the user interface flow not running smoothly, menus or options being too complex, problems with looking for a specific feature, etc. The testers have to consider how easy the application is to use for ordinary clients.
Product specification and standards compliance. It ensures that all specified requirements and standards of a product are met in the code. Testers validate the completeness of the created software.

The type of testing work that is commonly performed is testing work performed by individual software QA testers with the ability to identify errors and defects. With their oversight, they get to notice any issues, weaknesses, and inconsistencies. Once the testers are able to identify any defects, they are obligated to log them down. Developers, on their part, start to work on fixing the defects. They are aimed at thorough testing that is needed to release a stable software product that will function according to the roadmap.

8. Ensuring Security

Security should be one of the most significant concerns when designing any software product that deals with customer data or financial data. This should be achieved from the initial stages of the software development life cycle. Adequate time and expense budget should be allocated to teams for carrying out security reviews, testing probable weak areas and putting proper measures and precaution to check vulnerabilities.

In the case of software that does not handle personal identifiable information, it is also crucial to have robust security measures simply because customers will trust the system with their data, and any compromise of the system can be dangerous. To protect the data, at a minimum, data must be encrypted in transit and at rest; input must be validated on all external interfaces; access must be restricted based on the principle of least privilege.

Recent statistics show that the level of cybercrime and hacker attacks today is still at a high level. Although security systems are regularly improved, attackers are also finding new ways to commit crimes. Introducing security as a first-class concern reaffirms the pledge to the customers for the safety of their data and assets. Developing secure software is a discipline that enhances organizational relevance, structure, and stability, as well as the confidence of the public.

9. Release of the Final Product

The last step, when you are ready to release the software you have developed to customers, is very important and enjoyable. First of all, ensure that the stages of testing and debugging are as closed as possible so that customers do not encounter problems during the installation and usage of your software. If it is the mobile app that is released, then it should be posted at the correct store, either the App Store or Google Play Store. Actually, a lot of things depend on the type of product being developed. For example, an enterprise application cannot be available to ordinary users, so it is not placed in application stores.

Take care of the settings of the environment (servers) where your software will be located. For example, it can be a local, cloud, or hybrid environment. Moreover, you should properly calculate and predict traffic and load to choose the most appropriate storage capacity for the server.

For desktop software, ensure that you have links through which clients can download the software from your website. Ensure that there are printed and placed system requirements for the customers so that they can determine whether their devices are usable or not. Provide an easy download option in the form of single-click installation programs. Distribution is also an important aspect, but perhaps even more critical is letting people know about a product. Advertise in target markets through appropriate media.

10. Regular Maintenance

Many beginners think that releasing an app is the end of the process, and now they can rest getting orders from customers. In reality, once a digital product is deployed, it will need a lot of attention. What are we talking about? Regular maintenance, fixing bugs, implementing updates, and finding ways to improve is what you will have to work on next.

Naturally, innovation today is growing at a rapid pace, and it is always important for business owners to stay on trend. This is the reason why you need to maintain your software on a regular basis. Perhaps you can think of additional features that you can implement in the program to increase efficiency. Software can sometimes have glitches for various reasons, so you should constantly monitor how your product is performing for your customers. As soon as an error or glitch is noticed, you should react and fix it as soon as possible.

Need a Custom Development Solution?

Let’s collaborate to help your business.

Final Thoughts

For some people it may seem that successful software development does not require a lot of experience and knowledge. However, to create a truly quality digital product (mobile app, website, web application, etc.) you need to put a lot of effort and spend a lot of time. Creating software for your business with minimal programming knowledge and experience is not the best solution.

How to start a software development project? Only professional digital product development teams can ensure that all the ideas you may have are realized. At Red Rocket Software, we know the perfect pattern and program development cycle steps. We are always in touch with our clients to better understand the idea of creating a product, ensuring excellent results.