As Bill Gates said, "The first rule of any technology in business is that automating efficient operations increases efficiency. The second rule: Automating ineffectiveness increases inefficiency."
Today, the importance of digital transformation is growing, when companies transfer their operational processes to automated systems to increase efficiency while maintaining a high level of security and also transfer their business ideas to online services. In a competitive environment, it is important not only the quality of the software (hereinafter - the software) but also the speed of its development and implementation into operation. Over the past few years, there has been a change in requirements and approaches to software development.
In one article, it is impossible to describe even a small part of the currently available IT tools and methods. Consider the common standard approaches to the development and implementation of an automated system that is used by a good software QA company.
Four Phases of Software Development
Regardless of the scale of the business process automation project or the software development of a selling site, the software development cycle can be conditionally divided into four phases:
- Specification and architecture:
- development of functional requirements for software (technical specifications);
- system architecture development.
- Implementation:
- development of the database structure;
- coding: development of program logic, functions, interface;
- integration with other information systems (if necessary).
- Testing and documentation:
- development of test scripts (programmer/tester);
- development of autotests (QA programmer);
- functional (manual) testing [tester];
- development of technical documentation (programmer);
- user documentation development (technical writer).
- Implementation and technical support:
- implementation, user training, collection of comments and errors;
- technical support (collecting comments, fixing bugs, advising users).
The complexity of the software is comparable to the complexity of the most complex of modern machines, such as airplanes. For the correct formulation of the requirements for the product, business analysts need to do a lot of work to comprehensively study the automation object: collect requirements and ideas about the necessary functional capabilities of the system from all categories of users, study analogues on the market, and conduct brainstorming sessions with all participants in the project developing new and innovative approaches.