Software development process example

By Scott Sehlhorst | February 20th, 2006

double figure eight knot

We’ve presented an example of the software development process across several posts over the last two weeks. In this post we tie them all together, showing the steps in process order.

A discussion of the concept of tagging. Context and background on tagging as a technology, with pros and cons.
The top five problems with test automation suites. We’ve talked repeatedly about how test automation suites are better than purely manual testing. Here we look at the “second order” problems. What are the main problems with unit test automation? These represent our market requirements for the creation of a software product designed to improve unit test automation suite usage.
Converting from MRD requirements to PRD requirements. The ideation / triage process of determining which requirements should be addressed in software.
Creating informal use cases to support our requirements. We define the use cases that support the high-level requirements.
Writing functional requirements to support the use cases. With a user-centric approach to software development, it is imperative that we build out our functional requirements in the context of use cases – we keep our eye on the ball with this focus on the user.
Design elements that support our functional requirements. Without going into esoteric details about how to design test automation software, we discuss the elements of the design that relate to the application of tagging to addressing some of the larger market opportunities.
Iterating and prototyping. We show the iterative process from PRD to design to users and back again. [Update 21 Feb - added this step. Thanks again, Deepak]

Let us know if you’d like to see a discussion of any of these or other steps in more detail by leaving a comment on this post. Thanks in advance!

4 Comments

Deepak

Posted February 20, 2006 at 6:29 pm

I am very curious about how a product management team can use tagging effectively in an organization. We get feature requests from sales people, pre-sales, post-sales, customers and internal scientists, and it is always a challenge to do this in a manner that is scalable and sharable. I am curious as to how one would implement a tagging based approach to track that.

I think your process in itself is an excellent topic of discussion. Where do you place prototyping and sharing early designs with customers in this process?

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Scott Sehlhorst

Posted February 21, 2006 at 12:01 am

Deepak – great questions! Give us a little time to bounce around some ideas on the first one.

As to your second question about iteration – you’ve inspired today’s post, which will be arriving in a few hours.

Also – I will update this post to include a link to the new post. For the record, when Deepak commented, there were only 6 steps listed in this post.

Scott

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Deepak

Posted February 25, 2006 at 2:16 pm

I am happy to see that I can make sense on occasion. I think the 7 step process listed above is ideal, at least for the kind of business I am in. I think there are a couple of other models that might work, but we’ll leave that for another discussion.

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Scott Sehlhorst

Posted February 27, 2006 at 9:21 pm

Thanks very much Deepak. Feel free to start that discussion any time!

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Software development process example

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