Typically, software development consists of:
1. **Requirements gathering**. It involves understanding your customer's needs, and it's critical to get it right, so everything else will fall into place much more easily later in your project lifecycle.
2. **Estimation of resources and time**. To provide accurate estimates of the time and resources needed, everyone involved in this process must understand what they are doing. Once you know the scope of your project, you can estimate how much time and money it will take to build.
3. **Research**. Research enables you to identify users' problems and what they want from a solution.
4. **UI/UX design**. At this stage, you create mockups, prototypes and final designs of your product's interface.
5. **Software development** is a stage where the code is written. You can do this in-house or outsource it to a software development company specializing in writing code.
6. **Testing and QA** to ensure that the system works as expected and is bug-free.
7. **Further maintenance and support**.