Developing software can be a large and fairly complex task. For this reason there have emerged several disciplines within the field of software development. Consider how Wikipedia describes the software development process: “In software engineering, a software development methodology (also known as a system development methodology, software development life cycle, software development process, software process) is a splitting of software development work into distinct phases (or stages) containing activities with the intent of better planning and management. It is often considered a subset of the systems development life cycle. The methodology may include the pre-definition of specific deliverables and artifacts that are created and completed by a project team to develop or maintain an application”.
Core Activities of the Software Development Process
- Requirements Gathering
- High-Level Design
- Low-Level Design
- Development
- Testing
- Deployment
- Maintenance
- Wrap-up (evaluation)
For a very small software project you may get away with just sitting down to the computer and begin coding, if you are an experienced programmer. Software projects are complicated. People forget things and we need a way to organize ourselves and divide duties up between different people. The discipline of software engineering helps.