Methodologies

The first step in most formal software development projects is requirements analysis, followed by testing to determine value modeling, implementation, and failure elimination (debugging).

There exist a lot of differing approaches for each of those tasks.One approach popular for requirements analysis is Use Case analysis.Popular modeling techniques include Object-Oriented Analysis and Design (OOAD) and Model-Driven Architecture (MDA).

The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a notation used for both OOAD and MDA.
A similar technique used for database design is Entity-Relationship Modeling (ER Modeling).Implementation techniques include imperative languages (object-oriented or procedural), functional languages, and logic languages.