How to Develop a Software from Scratch?

Mahipal Nehra
How to build a software application from scratch, steps, cost of development? Every
company needs and uses software to drive success. As a business owner, you might be
toying with the idea of creating software, but there’s a lot you need to know
beforehand.

You might have heard of different development tools and programming languages, but
do you know which one to choose to build successful software? One of the biggest
problems for startups or anyone new in the market is understanding the process of
software development.

To help you out, this article will cover everything you need to know about building
software. So, without further ado, let’s get started!

Software Development Process from Scratch: Step-by-Step Guide

Below we have described 7 steps for building a software application from scratch.

Brainstorming

Software Planning

Designing

Software Architecture

Coding

Quality Assurance (Testing)

Deployment and Maintenance

Software development process involves creating computer programs and applications

that perform specific tasks. The process of software development involves various
stages, including planning, design, coding, testing, and maintenance.

Brainstorming
The first step for creating software is to start brainstorming with stakeholders
and analyze the competitors. By analyzing competitors, we refer to analyzing their
pricing model, product features, customer feedback, customer acquisition
strategies, drawbacks, and product efficiencies.

Read: What is Software Development

Once done with competitor analysis, identify your targeted audience, define your
unique selling proposition (USP), specify customer acquisition, software
monetization model, and define challenges that can slow down your business in the
market.

Software Planning
After brainstorming, the next step is software development planning. All you need
to do here is define software requirements and share them with the development team
(on-premise or outsourced).

Read: Top 10 Software Development Trends

After that, the development team will define the software modules, data and process
flow, and project roadmap to follow. Also, you need to conduct a cost-benefit
analysis by calculating ROI.
Designing
It refers to describing the UI/UX of the software. To ensure that you come up with
the best UI/UX design, you need to understand the mindset of your target audience,
define the system response upon different actions, determine a user-friendly
appearance, create wireframes to demonstrate basic layout and functionalities,
combine wireframes into UX prototype, and transform prototypes into full-graphic
interfaces.

Software Architecture
Now comes the most crucial part of software development - choosing the ideal
software architecture. With multiple architectures to choose from, including
Layered, Monolithic, Event-driven, Microservices, Service-Oriented, Microkernel,
etc., it can be confusing to find the one that meets your unique needs.

Read: Software Architect Roadmap 2023

But based on the detailed description of the functional modules, and integration
approaches (middleware-based, SaaS, point-to-point, iPaaS, etc.), you can decide
what’s best.

Once you have decided on the software architecture, another essential step is to
choose the tech stack for software development that consists of DBMS, front-end
programming language, back-end programming language, IDEs, version control systems,
etc.

Coding
Once you have decided on the software architecture and the tech stack to be used
for the software, comes the crucial part - coding. To create efficient software,
you need to hire developers with years of experience and knowledge.

They will help you with writing server-side, and client-side code, and APIs while
establishing development and delivery automation environments.

Quality Assurance (Testing)

While writing the source code of the software, project managers along with
developers need to create test cases and automated test scripts to carry out
performance, functionality, security, and integration tests. These tests help in
detecting and fixing bugs and errors so that the software works as expected.

Deployment and Maintenance

Last but not least, after the first version of the software is ready, it gets
deployed in the production environment and made available for the users. After the
deployment, users are more likely to point out bugs, allowing you to improve the
software and add new features.

How to Develop Software from Scratch

Key Roles of Software Development Team

What are the key roles of a software development team?

Project Manager
A project manager is responsible for planning, monitoring, and delivering the
project on time. From breaking a development project into smaller tasks, defining
milestones, identifying project dependencies, directing the team towards goals,
prioritizing tasks, managing resources, and deploying deliverables to monitoring
progress, tracking challenges, conducting regular meetings, coordinating with the
clients, project managers need to take care of the completing of the project.
UI/UX Designer
User Interface and User Experience (UI/UX) designers are responsible for gathering
user requirements, illustrating design ideas, designing UI elements, creating
navigation buttons, developing UI prototypes, identifying UX problems, conducting
layout adjustments, and adhering to style guidelines.

Frontend Developer
You need a front-end developer to create user-friendly web pages using programming
languages like HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, and Bootstrap. They also optimize the
software to load instantly, maintain and improve the software, collaborate with
backend developers to improve usability, create quality mockups, conduct usability
tests, etc.

Backend Developer
A backend developer is responsible for writing server-side code and APIs. Their
main role is to create, manage, test, and debug application logic, APIs, databases,
integrate data, and other behind the scene processes.

DevOps Engineer
Another essential part of the software development team is the DevOps engineer.
Their responsibilities involve managing servers, deploying updates, providing level
2 tech support, integrating infrastructure as code approach, establishing CI/CD
pipelines, maintaining containers and orchestration, and performing root cause
analysis to resolve production errors.

Quality Assurance Engineer

To test the entire software, quality assurance engineers are crucial. They design
and plan test strategies, choose testing tools, conduct or automate testing
processes, track test results, and report bugs.

Software Development Models Based on Sourcing

Although now you understand the crucial roles in the software development life
cycle, do you know which sourcing model to go for? If your answer is NO, then here
are the two most common approaches to sourcing a development team.

In-House Software Development Team

It refers to hiring in-house developers, training them, and using their skills to
create software for your business.

While you can directly supervise the productivity of your team, it can be expensive
as it requires investing a lot of money on things like employee training,
purchasing equipment, office rent, etc.

Also, it requires you to hire great talents for different roles as mentioned in the
above section but it can lead to a slow launch as the entire team needs to get
familiar with the working style of each other before working as a team to ensure
there are no mishaps.

Outsourcing Software Development Team

Another most popular and highly preferable method of software development is
outsourcing. It is the process of hiring a third-party development team without
investing a lot of money.

Outsourcing allows you to access top talents around the world, reduces management
efforts, and achieves fast delivery of the software project.

Also, outsourcing companies like Decipher Zone Technologies where the vendor takes
full responsibility for the team management, risk management, and quality of the
deliverables, keep you stress-free.
Cost of Building a Software Application From Scratch
The cost of building software can range anywhere from $50,000 to $450,000. Software
type, features, application logic, workflow complexities, third-party system
integrations, availability, performance, security, and scalability are some of the
major factors that play a crucial role in determining the software development
cost.

Conclusion

At first, developing software for your business might seem daunting, but gathering
requirements, proper planning, and hiring experienced developers can help you
deliver a successful project.

So that was all about how to develop software from scratch. We hope you find the
article helpful for your future projects.

Want to know the exact cost to develop software for your business? Get in touch
with our experts and receive a customized quote to hire an experienced development
team now!

FAQs
What are the steps to develop software?
Developing software requires the following steps:

Brainstorming

Software Planning

Designing

Choosing Software Architecture

Coding

Testing

Deploying and Maintaining

Which language is used to build a software application?

For frontend development, you can go with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and their
frameworks (Vue, Angular, React, etc.).

While Java, PHP, Ruby, Python, and C# are some of the languages to choose for
backend development.

How much does it cost to build a software application?

The cost of building software can range anywhere from $50,000 to $450,000 depending
on its features, complexity, and other requirements.

Posted by Mahipal Nehra | Posted at 10 Apr, 2023 Web