Customer Satisfaction was the buzzword of the 80's. Customer Delight is today's buzzword and Customer Ecstasy is the buzzword of the new millennium. Products that are not user friendly have no place in the market although they are engineered using the best technology.

Client Requirement
Before the start of any software development project, it is important to get the need for the product. The MindCells team works with the client and his team to gather the essential background for the company, the systems they follow, the envisioned role of the product – where it fits in, etc. Gathering this data is a crucial brick in the foundation of every relevant product.

Market Research
In case of a Client request, Market Research is made to identify the potential customers need. In this process, the already existing need and the possible potential needs that are available in a segment of the society is studied carefully. The market study is done based on lot of assumptions. Assumptions are the crucial factors in the development or inception of a product development. Unrealistic assumptions can become a nosedive in the entire venture.

Research and Development
Once the research is complete, the team discusses it with the Client and formulates the final plan. The team then conceptualises a cost-effective system that could potentially solve the client’s need better than his competitors. Once the conceptual system is developed and tested in a hypothetical environment, the development team takes control of it.

Mindcells' development method has the following activities;

System Engineering and Modeling
As software is always of a large system or business, work begins by establishing requirements for all system elements and then allocating some subset of these requirements to software. This system view is essential when software must interface with other elements such as hardware, people and other resources. System is the basic and very critical requirement for the existence of software in any entity. So if the system is not in place, the system should be engineered and put in place. In some cases to extract the maximum output, system should be re-engineered and spiced up. Once the ideal system is engineered or tuned up, the development team studies the software requirement for the system.

Software Requirements Analysis
In this phase, the development team investigates the need for possible software automation in the given system. By the end of the this study, the team furnishes a document that holds the different specific recommendations for the candidate system. It also includes the personnel assignments, costs, project schedule, and target dates. To understand the nature of the program(s) to be built, the system engineer ("analyst") must understand the information domain for the software, as well as required function, behavior, performance and interfacing. The essential purpose of this phase is to find the need and to define the problem that needs to be solved.

System Analysis and Design
In this phase, the software's overall structure and its nuances are defined. In terms of the client/server technology, the number of tiers needed for the package architecture, the database design, the data structure design etc are all defined in this phase. Analysis and Design are very crucial in the whole development cycle. Any glitch in the design phase could be very expensive to solve in the later stage of the software development. Much care is taken during this phase. The logical system of the product is developed in this phase.

Code Generation
The design must be translated into a machine-readable form. The code generation step performs this task. If design is performed in a detailed manner, code generation can be accomplished with out much complication. With respect to the type of application, the right programming language is chosen.

Testing
Once the code is generated, the program testing begins. Different testing methodologies are available to unravel the bugs that were committed during the previous phases. Different testing tools and methodologies are already available.

Maintenance
Software will definitely undergo change once it is delivered to the customer. There are many reasons for the change. Change could happen because of some unexpected input values into the system. In addition, the changes in the system could directly affect the software operations. The software should be developed to accommodate changes that could happen during the post implementation period.

Conclusion
Timing is very crucial in software development. If a delay happens in the development phase, the market could be taken over by the competitor. Also if a 'bug' filled product is launched in a short period of time (quicker than the competitors), it may affect the reputation of the company. So, there should be a tradeoff between the development time and the quality of the product. Customers don't expect a bug free product but they expect a user-friendly product.