Software Production Life Cycle For The Masses

With the global tech market headed toward a record-breaking value of $4 trillion, the world of software is becoming ever more competitive. With so much competition, you need to make sure you can create great products quickly and efficiently. Streamlining the software production life cycle is essential to creating great software products.

Here are the 4 most important steps to follow.
1. Research and Prototype
When you’re coming up with your latest bit of software, you shouldn’t start coding blindly hoping something will work. You need to build prototypes. You need to do research. Start by knowing what’s on the market. Get to know which technologies people have used to create the infrastructure for that software, what could work, and what doesn’t work. Build your first prototypes around this. Make prototypes not only to show data flow but also give information about interaction and behavior.

2. Engineer Your Product
Once you’ve got the kinks worked out and you’ve got everyone on board with your basic prototypes, it’s time to engineer the product. Start by listing all of the elements you want to have. Divide that list into “must-haves” versus all the extras. You need to know what your “minimum viable product” has to be in order to set yourself apart from the pack while containing just enough to gather data. You’ll be in feedback cycles all throughout the way, so make sure your schedule for development contains milestones to mark when to take the next step.

3. Market It
While every product designer would like their products to be useful to “everyone”, there’s going to be a specific kind of users you need to market to. Be sure that your marketing campaign hits hard on all the challenges that demographic uses. You need your message to resonate with those people first. Once they’re on board, you’ll have the support you need to expand to other potential users. Make sure to differentiate yourself from other similar products so that you can give people a reason to work with you.

4. Support It

Once you’ve released your software to the world, you need to make sure that you give your customers the support they need. Everything from installation to compatibility needs to be tracked through your support center. You need to have engineers on hand to answer questions from your users. A piece of software is only as good as its lifespan and if OS changes destroy the ability for your software to work for your core users, you need to make changes.

The Software Production Life Cycle Can Always Be Improved

With experience and new technology like machine learning, the software production life cycle is constantly being improved. In order to make sure your company is able to innovate and meet the needs of your customers, you need to trim the fat. The best way to do that is to diligently plan for every step of the process while allowing yourself time to make mistakes. Before you start designing, make sure you know what’s hot in the world of software design.