Software Development Checklist

Since a product’s requirements and software design can make or break a project preparing your software for development can seem stressful or overwhelming to an untrained individual. To ensure your project’s success, there are a few things a software engineer or team must do before diving into software development. Before jumping into coding, or pure development, we recommend completing a few activities to ensure a successful kickoff. These following activities can serve as a pre-development checklist, which should help your project flow smoothly from commencement.

1. Product and functional requirements

As the product owner, the best place to start is with a high-level product and a functional requirement document. What is the product you’re intending to develop? Take a first pass at describing the product and it’s intended functionality in an outline-style document. By incorporating all engineering discipline in one document you can later hone in on each  and dive deeper into the outlined specifications. Outlining product and functional requirements ensures that all stakeholders are in agreement with:

1. What the product is supposed to do
2. How the product is supposed to look
3. How it is supposed to function
4. What it’s intended uses are
5. And who the intended user of the product is

2. Understanding of Industry Regulatory Requirements

In addition to understanding the product and functional requirements of the product, it is also important that the development team understands the regulatory requirements pertaining to your product or business’ industry. Standards must be incorporated at the requirements and design level, since regulatory bodies will look for evidence – whether that be in the form of documentation standards, or coding standards, to deem a product certified to specific regulations. If you incorporate certain regulatory standards AFTER development is complete, then it may take a substantial amount of time to backtrack, which could possibly make a product late to the market.

3. HARDWARE AS IT RELATES TO THE SOFTWARE SYSTEM

Next on our checklist is hardware. Begin thinking about the product’s hardware as it relates to the software system. Ultimately, the product or system’s software, ties multiple hardware components together to give your product functionality. So, it is good to identify major hardware components within your system so that the development team can plan appropriately in the software requirements and design; which will be the next step in this checklist.

The most important hardware component that should be identified before any software-related activities is the microprocessor – or potentially multiple microprocessors, depending on the system’s design. This is helpful in understanding how the software will need to interface with, not only the identified microprocessor, but additional hardware components that will be determined later on in the process.

The microprocessor selection helps the software engineers develop requirements surrounding communication, data exchange, and control, to name a few. Hardware, as it relates to the software system, will be helpful in step 4 of our checklist; when we suggest creating software requirements, so that we have an understanding of how the software has to interact and integrate the individual pieces of hardware in order to form the greater system as a whole, and ultimately, have a sound understanding of the system’s communication method.

4. Clear Software Requirements

Keeping in mind regulatory requirements and the product’s hardware as it relates to the software system, you can begin developing a clear and concise software requirements specification. It ia important that all stakeholders agree on the software requirements specification so that everyone is in agreement as to what the product’s software must do. Having clear and concise software requirements, ensures that there is one location or document which describes the product’s intended software functionality – with the document describing the product’s software requirements in plain English, allowing all stakeholders to read and comprehend the development effort. It’s suggested that a software engineer or software consultant lead this effort, to ensure the product or functional requirements are appropriately translated into software requirements.

Clear software requirements help focus software development in a methodical manner, allowing software development to commence in an organized fashion. After software development is complete, testing efforts will commence to verify that all the software requirements written prior to development are met – so, upon completion of testing and verification, you know that the software is complete.

All in all, software requirements, outlined in step 4 of our checklist, say what the software does, and the software design, or step 5 of our checklist, says how the software does it.

5. Descriptive System/Software Design

So, after clearly laying out all of the necessary project requirements, the team can then begin to create a descriptive software design. Having a descriptive system and software design can identify any technical risks, so it ensures that your team is delivering the intended product that the client is looking for.

A project’s software design also serves as a communication tool, providing a single place where all members of the team can see where the design fits all together. Thus, without a software design, having multiple engineers working on software development would likely be messy and inefficient. In addition to the software design being a communication tool amongst the engineering team, you can use it to communicate with the client as well – and ultimately layout a plan for implementation.

Recap

All in all, the checklist comes down to 5 essential steps to complete to ensure success with your software development effort:

1. Identify product and functional requirements
2. Understand industry regulatory requirements
3. Identify the hardware as it relates to the software system
4. Develop clear software requirements
5. Create a descriptive system and software design

Once you have completed your software development preparation checklist, the real fun can begin! Your software team can commence development, implementing the software requirements in the code set.

We hope that this checklist helps give you confidence in smoothly transitioning from research into development, ultimately bringing your product to life!