Software developing is a highly demanded industry these days and is essential service for businesses. It is a dynamic industry as both technology and business requirements change from time to time. What software users see in software is an interface with probably the favorite color, nice buttons, easy to pick options etc. But from behind it is a completely different story for the software company. They have spent weeks and months on developing the software and after releasing the product also they may be searching for possible bugs. How do they able to release high quality software product is by planning and strategizing the processes from the beginning of the software development project (which is software requirements gathering).
Besides to the requirements gathering, there are three more major phases in software development life cycle that are developing, testing and release management. Software company has to manage and over come several challenges in each phase. They may first have to analyze the business to understand the processes which software should support. The business processes can be daily operations, monthly or yearly or even more. For example if it is a retail selling business, the software should provide features to manage sales and warehouse etc. On the other hand the business pays monthly salary for the workers, so the software should comes with payroll system. Common yearly operations would be discounts, bonuses, vouchers etc that comes into play in season. Like wise the software company should see the business future and deliver high quality software product for an affordable price.
As far as software company is considered testing phase is the most crucial part of software development life cycle. Because it is their responsibility to check the software before getting in to hands of the client and confirm the quality is high. Software companies use many procedures, practices to utilize most out of the testing phase. Few of the practices and procedures are cloning business databases, test data masking, test data automation, writing custom extract programs, manage test data bookings, test environment bookings, manage developers and operations team to implement better DevOps experience etc (to find out tools to do all these visit enov8.com). Test data masking may not be only a requirement from business but by lawsuit as well. It is about protecting confidentiality of real world business data that is needed for software testing purposes.