Software Design Aspects – A beginner’s HOW-TO
Designing a software project is more than scratching some heads and magically deploying a product. There are many stages required for all but the most simplistic designs to be ready for marketing, which are generally broken down into a few major categories; preplanning, planning;component design; user interface design; quality assurance and marketing and deployment.
The first stage is perhaps the most important. Too many software design projects begin with an idea that might as well have been jotted on a napkin, thrown into a trashcan, driven to a dump, uncovered by a homeless man and finally sold to Silicon Valley .
Before you really start putting money and man hours, it’s very helpful to ask yourself a few key questions about your software design. These questions include the identification of the software design purpose, scope, and viability. Before moving on to formal planning, ask yourself, is the marketplace already saturated with this software? If so, you will need to identify a very solid method of differentiating design to have any measurable success at gaining a software foothold.
Additionally, you’ll need to discover the scope of your project design. Is your program designed for collegiate chemistry students to study organic synthesis, or is it a worldwide software design for a multi-lingual software email program. Chances are, that most niche software designs have a better viability on a limited budget.
Niche program designs are hard for the average user to find, and thus, if you target them directly with something like a dog grooming scheduling program for their PDA, chances are you’re intended audience (albeit small) will be more likely to encounter your program than searching for something generic like “ftp program.”
By identifying your intended scope, you’ll more often than not also answer your viability, however, if you find you have not answered the third component regarding your software design, you will be required to address the aspects of just how realistic your dream may be.
How-to go on you may wonder? If you have good indications from software design preplanning stages, it’s time to begin ironing out some of the kinks. What operating system or hardware is your product designed for? Do you want your software to use GPL or open sourced code? How many hired hands will this project need, what’s your role, and other questions now occur.
This is the stage of the game in which you really start focusing on everything except writing actual code. Every detail should have a tentative design plan, along with a general idea of the software layout and distribution schemes should be thought upon.
Component design is when the hired hands start going to work. If your software is a larger than personal or small business scale project, chances are good, that there will be a need for additional insight into management and feedback throughout the project. Often during component design a QA team will begin working before the UI is even tweaked and built to start identifying any potential problems while the list of laundry is still relatively small.
Failing to have your software design well managed could lead to a derailing, which is extremely common place in the software design market. Basically, if programmers all run freely on a large project without a clear and concise head that can make the final calls, programmers will tend to “fork” software and run in completely tangent directions, often overlapping code or making completely incompatible code. It’s extremely important to manage the team because 80% of IT software projects do not make either timelines, budgets, or even to completion.
The next stage is user interface software design. Depending on the target audience, this can be very simple cut and dry, or very lavish. Someone looking to find a program to do large scale warehouse inventories probably would prefer a simple software design that functions, and runs on older computers.
This is directly contrasted by such software markets as mp3 music players, which generally are full of visualizations, skins, and eye-candy to help ensnare a little piece of the market share. Depending on your project requirements and budget, UI software design can be a fairly fast step to execute and QA test, or it could be slightly more beastly if your software lacks substance and you’re relying on eye-candy alone to make your software design sell.
After this all happens your software design needs further tweaks that will be picked out by QA teams and all the sudden things will be bouncing back and forth to move from prototype to alpha to beta and finally to distribution. Depending on your software’s scale you’ll market appropriately and hopefully enjoy financial success for your software design.
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