How to Create Software

• Conducting competition analysis (competitors’ product features, pricing & monetization models, customer feedback analysis, customer acquisition strategy analysis, product efficiencies and drawbacks).
• Identifying the target audience, understanding and analyzing their wants and needs, creating a software product concept.
• Defining product differentiation and formulating a unique selling proposition (USP).
• Defining customer acquisition, conversion, and retention strategies.
• Defining the software monetization model.
• Describing obstacles that can hinder entering a given market or industry sectors (including regulatory barriers) and suggesting how to address them.

• Defining and prioritizing detailed software features.
• Creating a software requirements specification.
• High-level software design:
  • App type/types (mobile, web, desktop).
  • Describing a list of software modules to build and specifying what functionality area each module covers and how the modules should interact.
• Describing data and process flows between the target software and other existing software, planning integrations.
• Creating the software development project roadmap with major milestones.
• Drawing up a business case: conducting cost-benefit analysis, calculating NVP, ROI.

• Conducting UX research to understand the mental models of the target audience.
• Describing how a user will interact with the software product (e.g., what system response the user gets upon different actions).
• Creating wireframes that demonstrate basic functionality and content layout on each screen.
• Combining wireframes into a dynamic UX prototype of the application.
• Performing the prototype user testing.

• Deciding on the appearance of user-facing software parts (choosing a color scheme, icons for the buttons, menus, tabs and screen layouts of the application’s GUI).

• Transforming software prototypes into full-color graphic interface mockups.

• Creating a UI kit for the quick development of user interfaces.

• Detailed description of how functional modules of future software should work at the code level.
• Detailed database design.
• Defining integration approaches (point-to-point, middleware-based, iPaaS, etc.) between the different functionality modules.
• Choosing the technology stack for the future software back end and front end.

• Establishing development and delivery automation environments (CI/CD, container orchestration, etc.).
• Writing server-side code and APIs.
• Turning static user interface mockups provided by UI designers into the fully functional GUI.
• Conducting unit testing and static code analysis (by developers).

How to build software faster and at a lower cost?

• Choose the technology platform (it will include a programming language and frameworks, architecture patterns, APIs, and more) based on a careful preliminary analysis of options. The development speed may differ 2 – 20 times.
• Use cloud services (messaging services, analytics and AI services, image processing services, etc.) by well-established cloud providers, e.g., Azure and AWS.
• Use trusted open-source tools and APIs.

• Creating a test plan with a testing scope, test types addressing all functional and non-functional software requirements, reporting procedures, etc.
• Creating test cases and checklists.
• Writing and running automated test scripts (API and UI tests).
• Carrying out functionality, performance, security, integration testing.
• Fixing bugs detected by testing.

• Deploying software in the production environment.

• (often for B2B products) On-site user training sessions.
• Fixing bugs that users discover.
• Planning improvements and new features to be added based on user feedback, product manager input, market trends, marketing strategy, etc.

Note: In iterative development models, all the described tasks will be cycled in 2-week – 6-month releases of new functionality.