Top 10 Best Practices for Software Development in 2020
Software, whether for business or recreation, is an integral part of modern society. From children to adults, everyone relies heavily on apps and service-backed software for different tasks. This dependency rests on the promise that software and services are secure and reliable.
Traditional software development is about writing code that follows a set of rules. The latest generation of technology, however, has seen a paradigm shift with advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning.
By combining these technologies, developers can create applications that understand instructions and pick up the additional data features and patterns needed for the desired result.
Software engineering matters because unique software is essential in almost every industry, business, and function. It becomes more critical over time: if anything breaks in your application portfolio, it needs fixing as quickly, efficiently, and effectively as possible.
Software development should be organized and well planned, or it gets messy very quickly. Here are some best practices in detail.
Contents
- Methodology
- Define your requirements and goals
- Recruit the right resources
- Write functional specifications
- Architecture and software design
- Implementation and coding
- Testing and quality assurance
- Software release
- Documentation
- Support and updates
1. Methodology
A software development methodology is a framework for structuring, planning, and managing a product's life cycle.
Popular methodologies include waterfall, prototyping, iterative and incremental development, spiral development, agile development, rapid application development, and extreme programming.
The development life cycle depends heavily on the method adopted. Waterfall, agile, iterative, and spiral are all established approaches, and it's vital to choose the one that fits the specific project.
Real commitment to the chosen method is what drives the project's progress. Building a small prototype is often a good way to test feasibility or explore new technology.
2. Define your requirements and goals
Gathering requirements is typically the first phase of any software product, and it starts as soon as you think about building one.
In this step you meet clients or prospective customers to evaluate their needs and the features they want. You can also find out whether the product is really needed in the market.
The keys to success are a thorough understanding of customer needs and a written list of the new product's features. This phase is the foundation for the entire development effort.
If the foundation isn't laid properly, the product won't find a market. However well you build something nobody needs, it won't matter.
There are plenty of stories of software products that failed because customers didn't need them.
3. Recruit the right resources
To make the software succeed, hire talent with the right skills and relevant experience, and assign the right job to the right person. It's equally important to invest in resources that maximize the team's performance.
Up-to-date desktops or laptops, suitable equipment, software, platforms for production and testing, and automated tools let the team use their expertise and build a sturdy product.
4. Write functional specifications
Functional requirements can span more than one document. They describe a product's actions or features abstractly; if the product is a black box, the functional specification defines its input/output behavior.
Functional specifications build on the product requirements documents written by people who work with end users or customers. Larger products may have a separate document per feature.
They matter because developers need them to create meaningful design documents, and documentation writers use them to produce end-user manuals.
5. Architecture and software design
After the requirements phase comes defining the system architecture and hardware specifications.
Here you assess the look and feel and decide what kind of code to write. A technical architecture team of experienced experts designs the product architecture, which defines the product's components and how they interact.
The architecture often determines the technologies used. The team must also keep the project schedule in mind, including the launch date when the product is supposed to reach the market.
Many excellent products fail because they reach the market too early or too late.
Once the architecture, components, and interfaces are defined, the next stage is software design.
At the architectural level, a component is a black box with certain functions.
The design should be modular and optimized; how functionality is balanced across modules can make or break a project. The object-oriented approach is one technique that ensures modularity.
Designers should aim for "maximum cohesion and minimal coupling." Code reuse is an underused part of design that, used well, saves a lot of effort and cost in the long run.
6. Implementation and coding
A typical project can contain hundreds or thousands of files. In large, complex projects, someone needs to define a directory hierarchy so files are stored in the right places.
Many people change files during development, and anyone who ignores the rules can break the entire build.
Developers take the design documents and development tools and start writing the application.
This is usually the longest stage. Each developer writes their own code and works with others to make sure components interoperate. A revision control system such as CVS is essential here.
During implementation, developers should comment the code well enough that someone picking it up later understands what's already written.
Good comments are vital, because other records inevitably get lost. Ten years after the original work, the only details left may be the comments inside the code.
A common good practice is coding small modules that are self-tested, unit-tested, and continuously integrated.
To avoid breaking existing functions, install automated tools and run regression test suites for each function.
7. Testing and quality assurance
Testing is probably the most important step for the product's long-term support and credibility. You can't compete if you don't control your software's consistency.
When software crashes at a customer's site, you lose functionality and credibility. The losses are often huge: unhappy customers won't buy again or refer you to others.
In most software organizations, this function is called quality assurance, or QA.
Test preparation, setup, and execution are vital to validating functionality. Testing should be independent of coding and can run alongside it.
Test reporting, effective defect reporting, defect tracking, and resolution matter just as much. Use automated tools and well-defined processes to find and fix bugs cost-effectively, as early as possible.
Test types include unit, integration, functional, system, and performance tests, and each level needs skill, preparation, and execution.
8. Software release
A software product is officially released before you start selling it. That means building a release on your server, making sure it's fully tested, and freezing the code.
The release gets a version number. Development continues afterward, but not on the released version; new features go into a separate branch.
The released version is only changed when a bug fix is shipped.
9. Documentation
The project plan, requirements, high-level design (HLD), low-level design (LLD), test plans, test reports, status reports, and user documentation are just as critical as the software itself.
These documents are often deliverables for customers or partners. They preserve understanding of the software, support monitoring, and reduce dependency on the core team, and they guide anyone who uses or works on the program later.
10. Support and updates
Once you start selling software, customers need help, most commonly with installation and getting started.
They may find a bug and want a fix or upgrade as soon as possible.
Or they may want new features beyond what's there. You need to be ready for that.
You'll also want to add features in later updates as competitors improve. Better service builds customer loyalty and a reference market for you.
Software should be updated regularly to keep up with changing needs.
These are the best practices to know when developing software. There are many ways to improve your development skills, but these will make your experience easier and faster. Good luck with your next software project.
