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With the changes in technology and tools, software development has also transformed from a simple individual activity of developing a standalone program to a much more complicated and distributed and collaborative activity that requires equal contribution from complex software ecosystem. In the past few decades, the software industry has seen emergence of different software development techniques. Some of these approaches were widely accepted and approved by the industry, like Agile software development methodologies. Despite these widely accepted approaches, some challenges still affect the software development process. A degree of process modification is required in some issues and this is referred to as process tailoring as different individual projects has different types of requirements. This raises the point that not all software development projects are same and each individual project has its own challenges.

Some of the basic challenges that software development team has to go through may sound very basic but are also very effective. One of the basic challenge is selecting the software development process. As we talked earlier, each software development task comes with its own challenges and thus require to be analyzed and then the team has to finalize on the software process. For some type of software developments, Agile process may work better and for some other projects, Rapid Application Development model may work better. It is up to the software development team to identify and choose what works for them the best. Another basic challenge is to identifying the right tools and ecosystem for the software that is being built. This may sound very trivial but it is one of the major steps in software development. Identifying and using the right tools from the beginning can help the team in long run in terms of completing the project in time and within specified budget.

References:

Mohapatra, P. K. . (2010). Software Engineering : A Lifecycle Approach. New Age International.

Storey, M. A., Zagalsky, A., Figueira Filho, F., Singer, L., & German, D. M. (2016). How social and communication channels shape and challenge a participatory culture in software development. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 43(2), 185-204.