The software development process is generally divided into the following six stages:

1. Plan. The overall definition of the problem to be solved, including understanding the user's requirements and the real environment, researching and demonstrating the feasibility of the software project from three aspects of technical, economic and social factors, writing a feasibility study report, and exploring solutions to the problem. And estimate the costs, available benefits, and development progress of available resources (such as computer hardware, system software, manpower, etc.). Develop an implementation plan to complete the development task.

2. Analysis. Software requirements analysis is the answer to what questions. It is a process of refining the user's needs, retrieving it, understanding it correctly, and then expressing it in a software engineering development language. The basic task of this phase is to work with the user to determine the problem to be solved, establish a logical model of the software, write the requirements specification document and finally get the user's approval.

3. Design. Software design can be divided into two stages: summary design and detailed design. In fact, the main task of software design is to decompose software into modules, which are data and program descriptions that can implement a certain function, and program units of executable programs. It can be a function, a procedure, a subroutine, a separate program and data with a program description, or a functional unit that can be combined, decomposed, and replaceable. Module, then module design.

4. Coding. Software coding refers to the conversion of software design into a computer-acceptable program, that is, a "source program list" written in a programming language. A good understanding of the software development language, the features of the tools and the programming style will help to select the development tools and ensure the quality of the development of the software products.

5. Testing. The purpose of software testing is to find as many errors as possible at a lower cost. The key to achieving this goal is to design an excellent set of test cases (test data and expected output make up the test case). How to design an excellent test case, the key is to understand the test method. Different test methods have different test case design methods. Two common test methods are the white box test object is the source program, based on the internal logic structure of the program to find software programming errors, structural errors and data errors.

6. Maintenance. Maintenance is the activity of some software engineering on software products after the completion of the software development (analysis, design, coding and testing) and delivery. That is, according to the software operation, the software is modified to adapt to the new requirements and correct the errors found in the operation. Write software problem reports and software modification reports.