How to Build Software From Scratch [A Complete Guide]

If you want to develop custom software from your scratch,
you might have these questions.

• How to create software from scratch
• How much does it cost to develop custom software?
• How much time does it take to build software?
• Important KPIs to measure the performance of your software

As a leading custom software development company, we have experience creating software solutions for over 100 clients.

Based on our software development experience, we are writing this step-by-step guide on how to develop software.

How to Build Software From Scratch for Your Business in 8 Easy Steps

Before you develop custom software for your business, you must know which problems you want to solve with your software product. So, let’s first start with identifying problems or challenges that you want to solve.

1. Identify Challenges of Your Business

   Your first step towards software project development is to rectify the problems in your business. Remember, you don’t just need to find the problems but you need to find the right problems.

   How do you identify the challenges in your business?

   • Go to the root level of your business to underline the business problems
   • Look whether your business processes are aligned properly to achieve target results
   • Check whether each department is in sync with the other one
   • Bring multiple perspectives when it comes to dealing with people’s problems

   These are the basic steps that help you to rectify the problems of your business. You might think why you should be focusing on identifying the right problems for your business.

   Why identify problems and how it helps?

   • Allows you to become clear about what problems you need to solve for your business
   • Helps you to know at which points you should focus more in your business
   • Get better ideas on which type of software products you should create
   • Helps you to customize your software according to business problems

   So when you implement software in your business, you get rid of problems and grow your business properly by establishing a process that ultimately benefits your organization.

   But, for creating your business software solution, you need to consult an experienced software development company like Space-O.

2. Consult a Software Development Outsourcing Company

   Once you have identified the problems, now you need to start building a software product. But, is it possible for you to build software by yourself? Probably, yes. But, it will take more time, money, and resources. Because you need to build your in-house programmers team and invest in infrastructure which could be more time-consuming as compared to outsourcing the development of software.

   This is the stage where the top software development outsourcing companies help with their experienced and skilled programmers team.

   You need to hire experienced software engineers who have knowledge of develop software solutions. At this stage, you need to look for software agencies that are experienced in creating scalable, reliable, and secure solutions.

   As there are tons of software development companies available in the market, it becomes challenging on how to choose the right software development company for your software project development.

   To select a reliable outsourcing company, you need to follow the following steps.

   What are the Things to Consider Before Selecting the Right Software Company?

   • Check the testimonials of the software companies
   • Check the previous projects built by the company
   • Know which technology stack they use for building software
   • Check the processes the company follows to create software
   • Know the expertise software development agency have
   • Check if the software company signs an NDA before the development

   If you want to know the meaning of NDA, read this detailed blog post on NDA for software development. Get a complete understanding of NDA and why it is necessary to sign an NDA, especially when you have a unique idea or challenge that you want to solve and make money.

   What are the Benefits of Outsourcing?

   Here are the benefits why you should outsource.

   • Access to a larger pool of talented software agencies
   • Low-cost of development
   • Makes it easy to scale your software
   • You don’t need to manage the software team

   Once you select the right software development outsourcing company, then that company will be responsible for building software from scratch. At first, the pre-sales team of your selected software company shares the work breakdown structure. After approval of work breakdown structure, development gets started and their first step is to understand and collect your requirements.

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3. Conduct Analysis of Your Business Requirements

   The business analysts team properly understands your requirements and then does market analysis. So, the BA team creates a software requirements specification document.

   A software requirements specification document has the following details.

   • Software goals
   • Overall information of software
   • Functional requirements
   • Non-functional requirements
   • Flow of the software
   • Design constraints
   • Software behaviour

   An SRS document consists of all the important information about your software including details like programming technology, operating systems, methodologies, and software testing modules. Based on the requirements, BA team members then create the wireframes of your software concept. Once the wireframes are created, the business analysts send you wireframes for approval.

   Wireframes are the blueprints of your software as it represents how your software will look like.

   The wireframes of a software product include page structure, layout, architecture, user flow, functionalities, and intended user behaviour. When wireframes get approved, the next role that comes at this stage is the design team. Once the wireframes part is done, the designing gets started.

4. UI/UX Designing of Your Software

   Design is an important stage in the entire software development process. UI/UX designers create the design according to wireframes. To create designs, UI/UX designers need to use tools like Adobe XD, Figma, Sketch, and more. The UI/UX team first of all clears the requirements and properly understands the main purpose of your software.

   As said, wireframes are the skeleton of your software. As clear as the wireframes, so do the design of your software solution. Your wireframes are converted into interactive prototypes that help to create the UI of your software. And, then the design is presented to you.

5. Development of Your Software

   In the SDLC, the development phase is the most important stage where designs, documentation, architecture, a software development methodology, and programming languages together play an important role.

   Software developers start writing code. The coding is done based on your specified requirements mentioned in the software requirements specifications documents.

   Developers need to choose the following as mentioned in the SRS document.

   • Programming language
   • Third-party integration
   • Software development methodologies

   However, if you are not sure what functionality to include in your software, then building an MVP version is the preferable choice. Moreover, you can learn about MVP in software development from this post.

   In addition, developers follow the best practices of software development so they are able to create top-notch and quality software for your business. The use of the right programming languages like Python and PHP and technologies like AI, VR, AI and ML helps to create scalable software for the future.

   Apart from the technologies, the developers need to decide on the software development architecture to code the application efficiently. While creating your software, a project manager is a point of contact to discuss the whereabouts of your software. For communication, multiple tools are used including Skype, Slack, Asana, and phone calls.

6. Testing of Your Software

   Parallelly, the QA team conducts the testing of your software components. Testers ensure that every functionality is in sync with others and functions well when operated. Testers perform different types of testing on your application.

   From testing database models to the different functionalities, the testers perform all the essential testing. This helps to ensure that software program has no bugs that are harmful to your company’s integrity.

   The work of the QA team is to check the bugs, glitches, and defects in your software. To perform software testing, multiple tools like Jmeter, Swagger, Postman, and SonarQube are used. So, developers apply their programming skills to fix errors and issues to provide you with bug-free and smooth-working software to automate your business.

   Check the following table to know the list of different testing getting performed on your software.

   Type of Testing	Description
   Regression testing	This testing allows programmers to know whether the code performs perfectly still or not.
   Functional testing	This testing ensures that all the functions of the software are working totally fine.
   Compatibility testing	This testing helps to test the application on different software, platforms, hardware, network, and browsers.
   Responsive testing	This testing helps to test the application on different devices
   Usability testing	This testing allows you to know how easy it is to use software for group representatives
   Performance testing	This testing helps to know the stability, speed, scalability, and responsiveness of a application.
   Security testing	This testing helps to know whether your developed software is secured or not.
   Accessibility testing	This testing allows you to check if your application is usable for as many people as possible even considering people with disabilities.
   Unit testing	This testing practice is used to check the individual units of software to know that each unit of code performs as required or expected.

   Once the testing of the software is done and works well, then it’s time for deployment. Check the next section.

7. Deployment of Your Project on a Server

   At this stage, your software is deployed on a server like AWS. Simply, deployment means to make available your software to use on another system. Software developers decide the method and configuration metrics that are required to deploy software.

   In the software products development process, deployment is an important stage because it allows you to make your software available to the public. Depending upon the operating system, you can install it accordingly. The software deployment process is of three stages.

   • Preparation
   • Testing
   • Deployment

   The code of the software app is sent live followed through different crucial stages. With the use of standard deployment tools like Jenkins and Bamboo, your software app is deployed or released on the web servers or production environment.

8. Maintenance of Software

   Most customers think after releasing software the work is done. No, and this is not true. After deployment, the maintenance of software is an important part. Although, maintaining software is an individual’s choice. But, to stay updated in the market, you keep your software always updated with customer needs.

   Now, you might think, what does software maintenance mean? The software maintenance process includes the process of changing, modifying, and updating your software application as per the latest market trends and customer needs. Whether your software is a web or mobile application, it is necessary to update at regular intervals. This ensures your end-users get bug-free software to use.

   This is the stage where you can sign a maintenance agreement with your software building agency. So, with this agreement, you have a proper idea of which parts of your software app should be maintained and updated to keep up with activities.

   As per the IEEE standard, there are mainly four types of software maintenance agreements.

   Here is more detail about all these four software maintenance agreements based on different maintenance types.

1. Corrective Software Maintenance

   The corrective maintenance of solving issues or bugs that have been detected surprisingly. In short, while using your software, the detected bugs or errors are solved. These errors might come to your attention or in the user feedback report.

2. Preventive Software Maintenance

   Preventive maintenance means checking your software at a regular time. This way, it allows you to update your software and reduces bugs or fixes. As its name suggests, preventive maintenance is done to avoid future risks or issues. With preventive maintenance, it becomes easy to reduce complexities in software.

3. Perfective Software Maintenance

   Perfective maintenance refers to updating the software code to enhance its performance. Through perfective, you are able to adopt new changes, as per user requirements. This way, you optimize the speed of your own software product. In addition, it allows you to improve your new software usability, performance, functionality, data security, and user interface.

4. Adaptive Software Maintenance

   When the environment of software gets updated, you need adaptive maintenance. This maintenance refers to updating your software code when it’s not properly working with an aligned environment.

   So, once your code is bug-free, then you go for software release. Now, it is time to choose the type of software maintenance you want. Depending upon your requirements, choose and sign the most useful software maintenance based on your requirements.

These are the software development steps on how to build your own software from scratch. After knowing the process, you might know the time durations to complete the whole software development life cycle. Go through the following section. It explains the timeline to develop a software solution in detail.

How Much Time Does It Take to Create Software?

The average timeline to create software ranges from 4 to 6 months. The timeline of software development depends on multiple factors. Here is the list of factors that impact the software development timeline.

• Size of the software team
• Software complexity
• The platform you choose for your software (Windows, macOS, and Linux)
• No. of software screens

These are the core factors that influence the timeline of your software development. Also, the timeline of can also varies on the location of your development team.

Let us know the cost of creating software. Check the next section.

How Much Does It Cost to Develop Software?

The average cost of developing software ranges from $30,000 to $1,00,000. Certainly, the cost of development can not be determined exactly. The reason is software is dynamic and every business has specific needs for developing software. Based on the requirements, the cost of development varies. In addition, the cost of software development depends on the following factors.

• Software complexity
• Software features and functionalities
• Size of software
• No of screens in the software
• Location of a software development company you hire
• Timeline to build software
• Design of software
• Third-party integrations

So far, you now know about the SDLC, its development timeline, and its cost. At this stage, you might want to learn about how to know if your software will be developed within the timeline and perform well as expected. That is software development KPIs. So, which KPIs help you to measure your software performance and programmers’ productivity?

3 Software Development KPIs to Measure Performance

In this section, you will learn about the most important KPIs that make it easy for you to measure your software performance and deliverables’ consistency.

1. Cycle Time

   This KPI allows you to learn about the time spent by software engineering teams to complete a certain task. So, with this KPI, you are able to calculate the efficiency of your software team.

2. Dora Metrics

   Dora KPI is used by DevOps teams to measure your software performance and also let a software engineer know whether the software is at a low performance or high performance. Within Dora metrics, the DevOps team is able to measure four core parameters that are deployment frequency, lead time for changes, mean time to recovery, and change failure rate.

3. Sprint Burndown

   The sprint burndown KPI helps you to determine how much of your development work is completed in a sprint. Measuring this software metric allows you to know productivity and task completed as well as pending. So, you are able to modify your project planning accordingly. Moreover, check our detailed article on top software development KPIs to learn more.

Are you still looking for more answers on software development? Then, check our next section. The following section of FAQs has answers to the most asked questions on the software development process from a business perspective.

Let’s Create Your Custom Software Application

Developing software consists of several stages and involves multiple specialists to get accomplished. As you understand the software development process, now it would be clear how to build software from scratch for your business. In addition, you also got answers about the cost and timeline of developing software.

However, if you have any queries or need consultation from our experienced software developer, connect with us. We are a leading software development company, having experience working with 100+ clients worldwide.