Before starting a brand-new web application or a mobile phone software, every developer and designer may invest a small amount of time into the planning phase to collect requirement and brainstorm designs, and then quickly rush to start coding and development. However, The first two stages (requirement & design) are often easily overlooked. But them would have a huge impact on the entire development process and the final product. This is SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle). The graph below clearly shows the corresponding cost that each phase may incur, and the data may be changed due to the different type of project. But most of the cases would produce similar graph📈.
A good finished product must be inseparable from a good complete plan and preparation. How should we prepare? The answer is not necessarily, the way everyone’s prepares might be different, it is difficult to have a standard answer. User-interface flow and entity relationship modeling are very important tools in software development.
First, user-interface flow visualize how would users interact with the software or web-app. Visualize a series of possible operations and actions from the user’s perspective. Through the graph of user-interface flow, developers can understand the user’s experience and determine the direction to develop their app and design.
Nowadays, most software is developed to serve users and make their life easier. Being able to understand the habits and preferences of users is a shortcut to create great software.
The next step is entity relationship modeling, which is often used in database design to visualize the structure of the database. Which helps developer to understand the structure of the database intuitively. The illustration above is a simple entity relationship model, through the model, developer would quickly understand the relationship between department and project.
One department has many projects.
One project belongs to one department.
To understand relationships between each entity, would be beneficial to develop a reliable database.
Today I introduced to user-interface flow and entity relationship modeling. These two design tools are very powerful for front-end and back-end development. But everyone’s working style and understanding ability are different. Please work and develop in the way you feel most comfortable.
The ultimate goal of drawing a graph or chart is to simplify difficult problems, so please be creative and use your imagination to start your development journey! Wish you all good luck! 🍀!
