Stages in the application development process

Question

I've heard terms like "deployment" and "production" applied to the development process. What are the usual stages and what do they involve ?

Answer 1

Depending on the academic paper you read, different stages will be highlighted (though many are common). Wikipedia has a couple of useful pages for you:

• Systems development life-cycle
• Software development process

Answer 2

I guess there is no single answer for that, but Wikipedia lists these as possible development stages:

• Market research
• Gathering requirements for the proposed business solution
• Analyzing the problem
• Devising a plan or design for the software-based solution
• Implementation (coding) of the software
• Testing the software
• Deployment
• Maintenance and bug fixing

Answer 3

Deployment: Taking compiled code and making it run on an application server

Production: the environment (servers etc.) that serve the application to the end user

The stages are:

1. Business Requirements Analysis - gathering info about what the user wants
2. Technical analysis - a high level overview of how the components will work
3. Development - writing code
4. Testing - checking that all works well
5. Deployment

In reality these don't happen in a strict sequence, there is often some iteration back and forth. This is usually implied by what are known as Agile development methods.