What is a Discovery Phase in Software Development and When Do You Need It

Commonly, the software development process can be separated into two major stages, such as Discovery and Delivery phases. Still, some of the customers can underestimate the importance of a discovery phase in software development due to different reasons. Today we want to describe the discovery phase and show the importance of it.

Requirements evaluation is the initial part of any software development process. The advantages of a discovery phase may not always be obvious, but still, they are invaluable. During the discovery phase, your software development partner will study the desirable vision product, research the market and carefully analyze the accurate requirements of the project. Also, if the already existing legacy web or software development project requires refurbishment, it is must to have a discovery phase.

Discovery phase allows the contractor to get a better understanding of the expected deliverables and functionality. The documentation that is often evaluated during this phase is key to a time-savings on all of the future requirements clarification.

Read our previous article about the importance of documentation in software development:

Why Documentation is so important for software development projects?

So, here’s what a discovery phase provides your project with:

— Definition of the project’s business goals
— Competitive analysis
— Evaluation of the required features and deliverables
— Understanding of general software concept by a vendor
— Clear goals for the final product
— New ideas and improvements evaluation

What is the process of Discovery Phase in software development?

At OS-System, we carefully take every client’s idea to understand what is the context of the project and how we can help our customer to meet his business goals. If the customer does not have a clear vision of the desired product, we focus on the evaluation of the idea and deep competitive analysis. We always strive to deeply understand the pains of our customers to deliver the best-quality valuable solutions.

Generally, the process of discovery phase consists of:

— Studying the customer’s business focus
— Evaluation of the user’s expectation
— Potential pitfalls identification
— Prioritization of the desired features
— Project roadmap creation
— The initialisation of the development environment deployment

Why do you need Discovery Phase on your project?

At first, the Discovery Phase in software development may seem as the complexity and cost-increasing factor for the project. In fact, this stage of the development process evaluates the direction of the project and describes the objectives for the required scope of work. This phase is also a go-to solution for legacy projects because it can reveal the right direction for the project to be developed and delivered successfully.

Discovery Phase creates a common understanding between the customer and contractor of the project’s business goals and the direction that it should follow as well as can give an ability to run the initialisation of the development environment deployment for the desired software development product.

At OS-System, we carefully define every aspect of the customer’s idea and bring it to the next level. We build long-term relationships with our clients and want them to know everything that is happening on the operations floor. Whether you are planning to build an innovative web or software development product, we can help you transform your businesses digitally by providing expert engineering and consultancy services. We have shaped our tech knowledge through continuous hands-on experience in planning, managing and carrying out complex enterprise application development, integration and support projects.