Creating software is difficult. You need to first get the requirements from the client (or create them yourselves), then you’ll use the requirements and design a working system. Once you’ve designed the system, turn the design into code. Next you’ll test your code to make sure it works and finally deliver the completed project to the client.

Today I’m going to look at the second part of the Creating Software series: The Design phase. There are a number of aspects to designing software. You need to take the requirements you gathered previously and start to create your software. At this point, you’ll have very little code (and possibly none at all). Don’t let this fool you though, the design phase is extremely important, and many projects have failed because they either didn’t design, or improperly designed their software.

Here are three things you can do in the design phase to make your software project more likely to succeed.
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Most software projects follow a fairly similar path from creation to completion. They start with talking to the user, getting the requirements for the project. It moves to the next stage, taking the requirements and getting them on paper (designing your software). After that, you get into coding, testing, bug fixing and more testing, and finally, you show the finished project to the client.

Now I know that I’ve outlined a fairly crude time-line but thats the basics of it. Over the next few weeks I’m going to go over each of the parts of the software project time-line and outline a few of the things that I find difficult.

Today I’m going to start off with the first in the list and also the hardest in the time-line; talking to the client and getting the requirements.
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