Software development is the process of designing, creating, testing, and maintaining software applications or systems. It involves a series of steps including requirements gathering, analysis, design, development, testing, and deployment.

The first step in software development is gathering requirements, which involves identifying the needs and objectives of the end-users and stakeholders. This information is used to create a software specification that outlines the functional and non-functional requirements of the software.

The next step is analysis, where the requirements are reviewed and analyzed to identify any potential issues or challenges. This is followed by design, where the software architecture, components, and modules are created.