How to Create Software: Key Tasks, Roles, Cost Factors
Delivering software development services since 1989 and practicing iterative Agile software delivery since 2007, ScienceSoft helps efficiently plan and build software products.
How to Develop Your Own Software Product: Summary
A development process for new software includes software ideation, planning, designing architecture, UX and UI, coding, testing, and deployment. When creating the lean working version (MVP) first, this process can take just 2–6 months.
A software development project team requires a project manager, a business analyst, UX and UI designers, front-end and back-end developers, QA and DevOps engineers. Depending on the project’s nature, additional talents can be required, e.g., data scientists, 3D designers.
In software product development since 1989, ScienceSoft helps design and build successful software products quickly and cost-efficiently.
Software Development Process Step by Step
Below are described the typical steps we at ScienceSoft take to complete application development projects. Some of the tasks can be skipped when you choose to develop an MVP. Also, different development methodologies (Scrum, Kanban, Waterfall, V-model, etc.) handle these tasks differently – they can be performed iteratively in parallel, or linearly.
- 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.
ScienceSoft
- 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.
Best practice: We start with planning and delivering an MVP and then proceeding with rapid, incremental software evolution based on the frequent feedback from product managers, users, etc.
ScienceSoft
- 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.
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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).
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Transforming software prototypes into full-color graphic interface mockups.
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Creating a UI kit for the quick development of user interfaces.
We recommend our clients to invest in the unique UI design only if the design is a competitive software product advantage. Otherwise, we opt for default themes and focus on software functionality.
Best practice: At ScienceSoft, we usually take time to plan and ensure user interface consistency in different browsers, mobile versions on different screen sizes, and mobile applications on different operating systems.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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Testing
- 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.
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- 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.
Best practice: For our clients with B2B startup, we take time to plan and organize exceptional user support. It's important to get ready to anticipate customer challenges and questions regarding software setup and operations, proactively provide solutions to potential issues, show how users can achieve max value while using your product.
ScienceSoft
Software Development Services by ScienceSoft
In software product development since 1989, ScienceSoft knows well how to plan and deliver effective, selling software products. Our service offering includes:
Software development consulting
- Software requirements specification.
- A PoC.
- MVP/software architecture design.
- Advice on advanced techs (AI/ML, AR/VR, etc.).
- Security and compliance planning.
- A detailed implementation roadmap.
- Communication with vendors, an RFP, continuous project quality management.
Product consulting
- Competition analysis.
- Solution conceptualization.
- Defining product differentiation and a unique selling proposition.
- Brand health check report.
- Rebranding insights, if needed.
- Visual identity recommendations.
- UX and UI design.
End-to-end software development
- Product idea conceptualization and feature management.
- Software UX and UI design.
- MVP/software development in compliance with industry standards and regulations (GDPR, HIPAA, PCI DSS, FIPS, COPPA, etc.).
- Testing and QA.
- Integrations with third-party systems.
- MVP/software launch and support.
Why Choose ScienceSoft to Deliver Your Software Product?
- Full-service software development company.
- 750+ experts onboard, including project managers, business analysts, architects, developers, data scientists, QA, security, DevOps, and support engineers.
- Over 3,600 success stories (including projects for Viber, eBay, MTV).
- 4.8 rating on Clutch.com.
- Mature quality management, backed by ISO 9001.
- Robust data security management, supported by ISO 27001.
- Competencies in advanced techs like IoT, big data, AI/ML, AR/VR, blockchain, image analysis, etc.
- Expertise in 30+ industries, including healthcare, banking, manufacturing, marketing, etc.
- For the second straight year, ScienceSoft USA Corporation is listed among The Americas’ Fastest-Growing Companies by the Financial Times.
Software Product Development: Success Stories by ScienceSoft
IPTV & SVOD Apps and a Web-based Management System for a TV Industry Leader
A success story of a long-term partnership, which helped the Customer to become one of the leading providers of streaming solutions in the world. Created with ScienceSoft's help, the company's mobile apps now power T-Mobile, Orange, MTV, BBC, and other large brands.
Viber – an Instant Messaging App with over 900 mln Users
ScienceSoft designed and developed an instant messaging and VoIP app for an ambitious startup.
Software Products Development for a Global Leader in Image Processing
A success story of a 5-year cooperation which resulted in 12 products (6 of them created by ScienceSoft from scratch). One of the products has been awarded Best Imaging Application by a prestigious press photographers association. ScienceSoft's expertise allowed the Customer to shorten time-to-market significantly (3-4 months per project).
Software Products for Life Science Companies
For over 10 years, a scalable team of 8-29 ScienceSoft’s specialists provides development and support services for a provider of biotechnology, drug discovery and chemical research services. Currently, our team covers such directions as services, support, development and testing.
Benefits of Software Development with ScienceSoft
Minimum time to market
Code-based MVP will be ready for users in ~ 2-6 months, which allows you to roll out your product fast and stay ahead of the competition.
Fast releases
With Agile development, CI/CD pipeline, DevOps approach, and a balanced mix of manual and automated testing, our teams deploy major releases every 2-3 weeks.
Optimal development costs
The usage of scalable cloud-native architectures, ready-made components (frameworks, platforms, and services), and public APIs allows us to reduce software development efforts and costs.
Access to advanced techs
We can enrich your software product with AI, VR, data science, IoT, and more.
Strong data security
ScienceSoft starts cooperation with signing NDA (already at the initial negotiation stage if needed) to guarantee the confidentiality of your information. We ScienceSoft create a protected environment (including DevSecOps practices and tools) for data processing and storage. Our security practices are approved by the ISO 27001 certificate.
Compliance
Our solutions are fully compliant with industry and legal requirements (HIPAA, GLBA, GDPR, etc.).
ScienceSoft as a Reliable Software Development Partner
Project Manager
- Creating a project plan with milestones and deliverables.
- Keeping the project on schedule and within the scope and budget.
- Facilitating and coordinating communication between all team members.
- Creating a risk management plan.
Business Analyst
- Eliciting wants and needs of future software users.
- Translating user wants and needs into functional and non-functional software requirements.
UX designer (focuses on usability)
- Performing UX research.
- Designing the interactions users will have with a software product.
- Designing the information architecture.
- Conducting usability testing.
UI designer (focuses on aesthetics)
- Creating the style of user-facing software interfaces.
- Creating a UI kit for user interface development.
Back-end developer
- Writing back-end code and APIs.
- Performing unit tests.
Front-end developer
- Creating a software representation level: everything that the user sees on the screen.
Quality assurance engineer
- Designing a test strategy and plan.
- Selecting test tools.
- Designing, developing, and maintaining tests.
- Implementing, documenting, and improving the testing process.
- Tracking test results, finding and reporting bugs.
DevOps engineer
- Managing software servers.
- Incorporating an infrastructure-as-code approach.
- Software containerization and container orchestration.
- Establishing CI/CD pipelines for automated deployment.
- Selecting and configuring tools to execute daily software monitoring.
The entire software development process is in-house
Pros:
- Direct supervision over the development process and team productivity.
Cons:
- High costs.
- Prolonged software development project start.
- All hiring and managerial efforts are on your side.
A mix of an in-house team and outsourced consultancy
Pros:
- Outsourced consultancy provides expert project guidance, mentors through the most challenging activities, and closes up the gaps in specific tech skills.
- In-house team can perform specific tailored, more interesting tasks to grow their expertise in a certain field (developing unique algorithms, improving software performance), while outsourced developers handle routine activities.
- Tasks that require exceptional security can be performed within the in-house network and infrastructure.
Cons:
- Risks related to vendor selection.
- It requires time and experience to establish smooth collaboration and communication between the in-house and consultancy teams.
- Project team coordination, the concerns about quick and quality delivery, risk management are partially/totally on your side.
Full software development is outsourced
Pros:
- Established software design and development processes, software development project management.
- A vendor assumes full responsibility for the team arrangement and management, quality of the project deliverables and related risk management.
Cons:
- High vendor risks.
Major cost factors:
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Preliminary costs
~ $100,000+
Software product MVP development.
~ $200,000+
Full-scale software product development from scratch.
Core Techs and Architecture Patterns ScienceSoft Uses
At ScienceSoft, we use cloud development and infrastructure services to deliver the majority of modern software products. Quality managed services, the pay-as-you-go model, and multiple ready-to-use components (messaging, service discovery, AI, AR/VR, IoT, data science, and more) offered by cloud providers can help create software faster and optimize its cost.
Clouds
Back-end programming languages
Practice
19 years
Projects
200+
Workforce
60+
Our .NET developers can build sustainable and high-performing apps up to 2x faster due to outstanding .NET proficiency and high productivity.
Practice
25 years
Projects
110+
Workforce
40+
ScienceSoft's Java developers build secure, resilient and efficient cloud-native and cloud-only software of any complexity and successfully modernize legacy software solutions.
Practice
10 years
Projects
50+
Workforce
30
ScienceSoft's Python developers and data scientists excel at building general-purpose Python apps, big data and IoT platforms, AI and ML-based apps, and BI solutions.
Practice
10 years
Workforce
100
ScienceSoft delivers cloud-native, real-time web and mobile apps, web servers, and custom APIs ~1.5–2x faster than other software developers.
Practice
16 years
Projects
170
Workforce
55
ScienceSoft's PHP developers helped to build Viber. Their recent projects: an IoT fleet management solution used by 2,000+ corporate clients and an award-winning remote patient monitoring solution.
Practice
4 years
ScienceSoft's developers use Go to build robust cloud-native, microservices-based applications that leverage advanced techs — IoT, big data, AI, ML, blockchain.
Front-end programming languages
Languages
Practice
21 years
Projects
2,200+
Workforce
50+
ScienceSoft uses JavaScript’s versatile ecosystem of frameworks to create dynamic and interactive user experience in web and mobile apps.
JavaScript frameworks
Practice
13 years
Workforce
100+
ScienceSoft leverages code reusability Angular is notable for to create large-scale apps. We chose Angular for a banking app with 3M+ users.
Workforce
80+
ScienceSoft achieves 20–50% faster React development and 50–90% fewer front-end performance issues due to smart implementation of reusable components and strict adherence to coding best practices.
ScienceSoft uses Meteor for rapid full-stack development of web, mobile and desktop apps.
By using a lightweight Vue framework, ScienceSoft creates high-performant apps with real-time rendering.
With Next.js, ScienceSoft creates SEO-friendly apps and achieves the fastest performance for apps with decoupled architecture.
When working with Ember.js, ScienceSoft creates reusable components to speed up development and avoid code redundancy.
Mobile
Practice
16 years
Projects
150+
Workforce
50+
ScienceSoft’s achieves 20–50% cost reduction for iOS projects due to excellent self-management and Agile skills of the team. The quality is never compromised — our iOS apps are highly rated.
Practice
14 years
Projects
200+
Workforce
50+
There are award-winning Android apps in ScienceSoft’s portfolio. Among the most prominent projects is the 5-year-long development of Viber, a messaging and VoIP app for 1.8B users.
Practice
11 years
Projects
85+
Workforce
10+
ScienceSoft cuts the cost of mobile projects twice by building functional and user-friendly cross-platform apps with Xamarin.
ScienceSoft uses Cordova to create cross-platform apps and avoid high project costs that may come with native mobile development.
ScienceSoft takes the best from native mobile and web apps and creates the ultimate user experience in PWA.
Practice
8 years
Projects
300+
ScienceSoft reduces up to 50% of project costs and time by creating cross-platform apps that run smoothly on web, Android and iOS.
ScienceSoft will save you from double or even triple expenses associated with platform-specific coding by creating cross-platform apps in Flutter.
With Ionic, ScienceSoft creates a single app codebase for web and mobile platforms and thus expands the audience of created apps to billions of users at the best cost.
Desktop
Practice
34 years
Workforce
40
ScienceSoft's C++ developers created the desktop version of Viber and an award-winning imaging application for a global leader in image processing.
Practice
4 years
Workforce
40
We used Qt to deliver a cross-platform desktop app for a global leader in image processing, a desktop version of Viber, VoIP messenger with over 1 billion users, and an anti-procrastination app acknowledged by The Daily Telegraph and BBC.
Practice
19 years
Projects
200+
Workforce
60
Our C# developers created the world’s largest PLM software. Their recent projects: development of SaaS for vCIO services management and underwriting software for a global aviation insurer.
Practice
15 years
Workforce
~40
We have delivered WPF-based solutions for a leading market research company and a global leader in image processing.
We use Objective-C to implement native macOS features in desktop apps.
Practice
10 years
Workforce
30
We use Python for rapid development of cross-platform desktop apps.
Databases / data storages
SQL
Our Microsoft SQL Server-based projects include a BI solution for 200 healthcare centers, the world’s largest PLM software, and an automated underwriting system for the global commercial insurance carrier.
We’ve implemented MySQL for Viber, an instant messenger with 1B+ users, and an award-winning remote patient monitoring software.
Azure SQL Database is great for handling large volumes of data and varying database traffic: it easily scales up and down without any downtime or disruption to the applications. It also offers automatic backups and point-in-time recoveries to protect databases from accidental corruption or deletion.
ScienceSoft's team has implemented Oracle for software products used by GSK and AstraZeneca. We’ve also delivered Oracle-based SCM platform for Auchan, a retail chain with 1,700 stores.
ScienceSoft has used PostgreSQL in an IoT fleet management solution that supports 2,000+ customers with 26,500+ IoT devices. We’ve also helped a fintech startup promptly launch a top-flight BNPL product based on PostgreSQL.
NoSQL
Our Apache Cassandra consultants helped a leading Internet of Vehicles company enhance their big data solution that analyzes IoT data from 600,000 vehicles.
ScienceSoft has helped one of the top market research companies migrate its big data solution for advertising channel analysis to Apache Hive. Together with other improvements, this led tо 100x faster data processing.
We use HBase if your database should scale to billions of rows and millions of columns while maintaining constant write and read performance.
With ScienceSoft’s managed IT support for Apache NiFi, an American biotechnology corporation got 10x faster big data processing, and its software stability increased from 50% to 99%.
ScienceSoft used MongoDB-based warehouse for an IoT solution that processed 30K+ events/per second from 1M devices. We’ve also delivered MongoDB-based operations management software for a pharma manufacturer.
Real-time data processing
About ScienceSoft
A 34-year provider of software development services headquartered in the US, ScienceSoft helps both startups and mature software product companies worldwide envision competitive and selling software products, cost-efficiently launch an MVP in 2–6 months and confidently grow it to a full-blown quality product.