The development cycle, and how I follow it

Hello! I am Piyush Raj and today I will be telling you about the development cycle and how I personally follow it. In this post, I will have the different stages in software development and at the end of each paragraph, I will show you what I do at that particular stage.

Pre-Production: Where the pot of ideas boil

As the name suggests, pre-production is that stage before creating the final product. This is the stage where the team comes together to plan out how the product will look like through the use of designs, mind maps, etc.

In this stage, I usually like to make a Milanote board and put design specifications(or a checklist that the final product must/should have) and based on that I(or my team if applicable) make a visual design of the final product using it. I like to use Milanote because it has many tools that help me put my ideas down in a flowing way that anyone can understand and helps me to plan in an efficient way. I also like to use MS Paint and Gimp to create any visual designs.

Production: Where the ideas are cooked into finished products

This is probably the most exciting(and my favourite) part of the development cycle. This is where you(and your team) come together to make the final product based on all of the planning you did in the pre-production stage.

As I said earlier this is my favourite part of the development cycle. I usually like to use GitHub as my source control tool for my projects and to collaborate on projects as well. As for what tools I use, it's probably what you'd expect, VS Code for creating web projects and the Unity Engine to create video games.

Post-Production

This is kind of what most people would refer to as the "boring" or not so fun stage. This is the stage where the final product is tested for any issues. This is done mainly through AB testing and other forms of testing. This is also the stage where apps are given constant updates after production. This stage mainly depends on user feedback and results from the AB tests.

I'll be very honest, I haven't really been part of a post-production stage but I do know that we run beta tests and roll them out to a few users if it's an app and we usually ask for opinions if the final product is a website. We then work accordingly based on the feedbacks we receive.

Conclusion

So, I guess that was the end of this article and I would like to thank you for taking your time to read this article. I hope you enjoyed and hope you learnt something new!