Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) is a process used by the software industry to design, develop and test high quality software. The SDLC aims to produce a high-quality software that meets or exceeds customer expectations, reaches completion within times and cost estimates.
· SDLC is the acronym of Software Development Life Cycle.
· It is also called as Software Development Process.
PHASES:
Phase 1: Requirement collection and analysis
The requirement is the first stage in the SDLC process. It is conducted by the senior team members with inputs from all the stakeholders and domain experts in the industry. Planning for the quality assurance requirements and reorganization of the risks involved is also done at this stage. Requirements Gathering stage need teams to get detailed and precise requirements. This helps companies to finalize the necessary timeline to finish the work of that system.
Phase 2: Defining
Once the requirement analysis phase is completed the next step is to define and document software needs. This process conducted with the help of 'Software Requirement Specification' document also known as 'SRS' document. It includes everything which should be designed and developed during the project life cycle.
There are mainly five types of feasibilities checks: Economic, Legal, Operation feasibility, Technical, Schedule.
Phase 3: Design
In this third phase, the system and software design documents are prepared as per the requirement specification document. This helps define overall system architecture. This design phase serves as input for the next phase of the model.
Phase 4: Coding
Once the system design phase is over, the next phase is coding. In this phase, developers start building the entire system by writing code using the chosen programming language. In the coding phase, tasks are divided into units or modules and assigned to the various developers. It is the longest phase of the Software Development Life Cycle process.
In this phase, Developer needs to follow certain predefined coding guidelines. They also need to use programming tools like compiler, interpreters, debugger to generate and implement the code.
Phase 5: Testing
Once the software is complete, and it is deployed in the testing environment. The testing phase of the software development lifecycle (SDLC) is where you focus on investigation and discovery. During the testing phase, the testing team starts testing the functionality of the entire system. This is done to verify that the entire application works according to the customer requirement.
During this phase, QA and testing team may find some bugs/defects which they communicate to developers. The development team fixes the bug and send back to QA for a re-test. This process continues until the software is bug-free, stable, and working according to the business needs of that system.
Phase 6: Installation/Deployment
Once the software testing phase is over and no bugs or errors left in the system then the final deployment process starts. Based on the feedback given by the project manager, the final software is released and checked for deployment issues if any.
Phase 7: Maintenance
Maintenance is necessary to eliminate errors in the system during its working life and to tune the system to any variations in its working environments. It must meet the scope of any future enhancement, future functionality and any other added functional features to cope up with the latest future needs. It has been seen that there are always some errors found in the systems that must be noted and corrected. It also means the review of the system from time to time.
The review of the system is done for:
· Knowing the full capabilities of the system
· Knowing the required changes or the additional requirements
· Studying the performance.
The good software engineer should have enough knowledge on how to choose the SDLC model based on the project context and the business requirements. Therefore, it may be required to choose the right SDLC model according to the specific concerns and requirements of the project to ensure its success.
Thank you for this useful article. It is interesting to read about software development life cycle phases. This post is short but very understandable.