How to Develop your First CS / IT Project | Software development Lifecycle

A lot of students in their final year of Information Technology / Computer Science course are confused and overwhelmed about their software project development. Final Year IT/CS project is a crucial milestone in every IT/CS student’s educational phase. If project development is tackled in an unorganized fashion, it can mess up your entire final year score (as final year projects have a big share of marks and affect your overall score).

You must have surely heard about Project Development Phases in Software engineering. Well, it does have a lot of importance in your project development so make sure you take that subject seriously.

Here are some of the typical software project development lifecycle phases (SDLC):

• Requirement Gathering Phase
• Analysis Phase
• Design Phase
• Coding Phase
• Testing Phase
• Implementation & Maintenance Phase

I will be explaining you the importance and meaning of all these phases in terms of a student’s point of view and how should a typical IT/CS student  implement these phases for his/her project development.

Requirement Gathering Phase

• This is usually the first initial phase of your project development, so it is very important to go ahead with this step carefully. In this phase what a student can do is decide on his/her  project topic.
• Project topic selection can itself be tricky and the best way to tackle this task is to ask yourself will your software, web-application help solve people’s problems (after all the very important mantra of software development to remember is customer is the KING)
• Once you select a project topic you need to check for similar projects that are already been developed. This will give you some really useful insights on how your project should be, also you can check on their success and feasibility.
• If your topic doesn’t seem to solve a real practical problem, chances are that your project won’t  have any relevance.
• Talk to people who are interested in software solutions and find out their technical problems,  maybe by taking a survey and you might find your desired project topic.

Analysis Phase

• Once  you finalize  your project topic , you then need to validate it i.e check for various feasibility parameters.
• First of all, check whether the project is actually implementable. A lot of times students have big ideas which in the end prove to be useless in terms of practical usage (this is usually because of lack of experience so don’t get offended guys).
• Second important factor to check is which technology is to be used for developing the project. Select the one which you are comfortable with; since its your first project you need not learn something entirely new and then fall short of time. Usually students find ASP.NET, C#.NET better over conventional JAVA technology but these  are all personal choices. Bottom line is to select the one language that you are comfortable with.
• Time constraint is also important factor to check on. Usually this parameter is hard to predict on since it is your first time. However, it is important that you plot down a rough timeline of your entire project development and strictly follow it. You don’t want to submit your project late for sure after doing so much hardwork, right?
• Generally this phase ends by a ‘project synopsis’  in which you create a soft-copy of your project analysis (Check this typical Sysnopsis Document)

Students who go ahead with the first 2 phases in a proper organized manner are more likely to get their projects working successfully and more importantly with high efficiency of management.

Design Phase

• This phase is many  times overlooked by students and trust me they find it difficult to go ahead with the actual coding of the project.
• The reason is, when you have a rough design, model, or prototype in front of you, it is easy to code the same.
• When you plot your visual ideas and make rough designs it can also help with finding out some design flaws and errors, which in future could be more troublesome to solve after you have actually coded for the same.

Coding Phase

• Well This phase requires the least explanation i believe, although you need to know 2 very important tips here:
  • First: When coding always use comments and proper indentation (i know students usually don’t since I myself as a student didn’t do it but paid the price later 😛 ).
  • Second: After completing one module try and run it instead of coding the next module or entire project.

Testing Phase

• This phase is also very important in real life situations as well as for students. Why so?
• What if you project doesn’t work during the final project presentation just because you had to show it on college computer system?
• So make sure that you run your project in 2 or 3 different environments
• Specially for Android projects, check the application at least on 2-3 different versions of androids with different screen resolutions.
• Do not test your project all by yourself. Always ask teachers or your project guides to do a second round of testing, maybe they’ll spot some bugs which you couldn’t, and most likely they will.
• If its a live project let the client test it as well.

Implementation & Maintenance Phase

• This phase is where you actually run the project.
• Maintenance is usually not to be worried from a student’s point of view, however if your project is going to have huge database load, then it is necessary to check on performance regularly till your final project presentation. This is to make sure it doesn’t crash at the crucial moment.