The software development process is long and tedious. Project managers and system analysts can use software development life cycles to plan, design, develop, test and eventually deploy information systems or software products.
SDLC is for Software Development Life Cycle, and it is a process for developing software that maintains its quality and consistency. The SDLC process is designed to create high-quality software that fulfils customer requirements. The system development should be completed within the schedule and budget constraints. SDLC is a step-by-step process that outlines how to plan, develop, and maintain software. Each phase of the SDLC life cycle includes
its own set of processes and outputs, which feed onto another.
1. What is the importance of the SDLC?
The following are some essential reasons SDLC is crucial while
designing a software system.
- It serves as a foundation for project planning, scheduling, and cost.
- Provides a framework for a group of activities and deliverables that are all the same.
- It’s a system for keeping track of and controlling projects.
- Increases the visibility of project planning to all development process stakeholders.
- Increased and enhanced development speed
- Improved client relations
- Assists you in lowering project risk and reducing project management plan overhead.
2. Phases of Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC)
The entire SDLC process is divided into the following SDLC steps:
Phase 1: Requirement collection and analysis
The requirement is the first stage in the SDLC process. The senior team members conduct it with inputs from all the stakeholders and domain experts in the industry. Planning for the quality assurance requirements and recognising the risks involved is also done at this stage. This stage gives a clearer picture of the entire project’s scope and the anticipated issues, opportunities, and directives that triggered the project. Requirements Gathering stage needs teams to get detailed and precise requirements. This helps companies finalise the necessary timeline to finish the work of that system.
Phase 2: A feasibility study
Once the requirement analysis phase is completed, the next DLC step is defining and documenting software needs. This process was conducted with the help of the ‘Software Requirement Specification’ document, also known as the ‘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: Can we complete the project within the budget or not?
- Legal: Can we handle this project as cyber law and another regulatory framework/compliances.
- Operation feasibility: Can we create operations that the client expects?
- Technical: We need to check whether the current computer system can support the software
- Schedule: Decide whether the project can be completed within the given schedule or not.
Phase 3: Design
The system and software design documents are prepared in this third phase as per the requirement specification document. This helps define the overall system architecture. This design phase serves as input for the next step of the model.
There are two kinds of design documents developed in this phase:
High-Level Design (HLD)
- Brief description and name of each module
- An outline of the functionality of every module
- Interface relationship and dependencies between modules
- Database tables identified along with their key elements
- Complete architecture diagrams along with technology details
Low-Level Design (LLD)
- Functional logic of the modules
- Database tables, which include type and size
- CompFullail of the interface
- Addresses all types of dependency issues
- Listing of error messages
- Total input and outputs for every module
Phase 4: Coding
Once the system design phase is over, the next phase is coding. In this phase, developers start to build 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 most extended extension of the Software Development Life Cycle process. In this phase, the developer needs to follow specific predefined coding guidelines. They also need to use programming tools like compilers, interpreters, and debuggers to generate and implement the code.
Phase 5: Testing
Once the software is complete, it is deployed in the testing environment. The testing team starts testing the functionality of the entire system. This is done to verify that the whole application works according to the customer’s requirements. During this phase, the QA and testing team may find some bugs/defects, which they communicate to developers. The development team fixes the bug and sends it back to QA to 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, there are no bugs, and absolute software is released and checked for deployment issues.
Phase 7: Maintenance
Once the system is deployed and customers start using the developed system, three activities occur. Bugs or errors left in the system are issues left in the system teeth of some or mistakes left in the design that are not tested – Upgrading the application to the newer versions of the Software.
Enhancement – Adding some new features to Software to to to to to the existing software. The main focus of this SDLC phase is to ensure that needs continue to be met and that the system continues to perform as per the specification mentioned in the first phase.
3. Popular SDLC Models
Here are some of the most Software Development Life Cycle Models:
3.1 Waterfall Model
The waterfall is a widely accepted SDLC model. In this approach, the whole software development process is divided into various phases of SDLC. In this SDLC model, the outcome of one step acts as the input for the next paste step.
This SDLC model is documentation-intensive, with earlier phases documenting what needs to be performed in the subsequent steps.
3.2 Incremental Model
The incremental model is not separately. It is essentially a series of waterfall cycles. The requirements are divided into groups at the start of the project. For each group, the SDLC model is followed to develop software. The SDLC life cycle process is repeated, with each release adding more functionality until all requirements are met. In this method, every cycle acts as the maintenance phase for the previous software release. Modification to the incremental model allows development cycles to overlap. After that subsequent cycle may begin before the last process is complete.
3.3 V-Model
In this type of SDLC model testing and development, the phase is planned parallel. So, there are verification phases of SDLC on one side and the validation phase on the other side. V-Model joins by Coding phase.
3.4 Agile Model
Agile methodology is a practice that promotes continued interaction of development and testing during the SDLC process of any project. In the Agile method, the entire project is divided into small incremental builds. These builds are provided in iterations, and each iteration lasts from one to three weeks.
3.5 Spiral Model
The spiral model is a risk-driven process model. This SDLC testing model helps the team adopt elements of one or more process models like a waterfall, incremental, waterfall, etc. This model adopts the best features of the prototyping model and waterfall mode—the spiral methodology’s ‘ best features combines prototyping and concurrency in design and development activities.
3.6 Big bang model
The Big bang model focuses on all types of software development and coding resources, with no or very little planning. The requirements are understood and implemented when they come. This model works best for small projects with smaller development teams working together. It is also helpful for academic software development projects. It is an ideal model where requirements are either unknown or the final release date is not given.
4. Conclusion
For the Project to be completed successfully, following an appropriate life cycle is critical. As a result, management becomes more accessible. Each Software Development Life Cycle model has its advantages and disadvantages. The ideal model for any project is determined by aspects such as requirement (clarity or ambiguity), system complexity, project size, cost, skill restriction, etc. For example, Spiral and Agile models are appropriate to apply in an ambiguous need because the required modification can be accommodated easily at any stage. The waterfall model is the foundation upon which all other SDLC models are built.
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