Software Development Life Cycle - Easy Learnings

Software development process, commonly known as Software development life cycle, is a process used by the software industry for designing, development and testing high quality software. The Aim of Software development life cycle(SDLC) is to produce high-quality software that meets i.e. exceeds customer expectations, and also reaching completion within the cost estimates and within time.

The framework of SDLC is to define tasks performed at each step in the software development process.

In this tutorial we are going to learn about the Software Development Life Cycle, which includes the following topics,

• What is SDLC?
• Stages of SDLC
• Models of SDLC
• Conclusion

What is SDLC?

The process followed by software project within the software organization is called software development life cycle. Basically its consists of detailed plan which describe how to develop, maintain a software, replace and alter or enhance specific software.

SDLC

“Life cycle defines a methodology for improving the quality of software and overall development process”.

Stages of SDLC

Planning and Requirement analysis:

Requirement analysis is the fundamental as well as most important stage in SDLC model. It’s basically performed by the senior members of team who have inputs of customer, sales department, market surveys and domain experts in the industry.

This information is then used to plan the basic project approach and to conduct product feasibility study in the economical, operational and technical areas.

Requirements:

Once the requirement analysis is done, the next step is to clearly define and document the product requirements and get them approved from customer or market analysts. This is done through an SRS commonly known as (Software requirement specification).

Designing product architecture:

SRS is the reference for the product architects to come out with the best architecture for the product to be developed. Usually more than one design approach for the product architecture is proposed and documented in a Design document specification.

A design approach clearly defines all the architectural modules of the products along with its data flow and communication representation with external modules. 

Developing the product:

It is the stage of SDLC from where the actual development starts and the product is in building state. The programming code is generated as per DDS(Design document specification). If the design is performed in Organized and detailed manner, accomplishment of code generation is done without any hassle.

Testing:

Testing stage is usually the subset of all the stages as in the modern SDLC models Testing activities are mostly involved in all stages of Software development life cycle model(SDLC).

In this stage the product defects are reported,tracked , fixed and retested until the product reaches the quality standards defined in SRS (Software requirement  specification).

Deployment in market and maintenance:

Once the product is tested, it is formally released in the appropriate market. Sometime product deployment happens in stages as per the business Strategy of that organization. 

There are various software development life cycle models defined and designed which are followed during the software development process. These models are commonly called Software development process model. Each Model have a series of unique steps to its type to ensure success.

Models of SDLC

The waterfall model is the oldest and most important model in Software development life cycle. It is also called linear sequential life cycle model. It’s very simple and easy to use and understand and also in this model, each phase must be completed before the next phase can begin. Also there is no overlapping in the phases.

The sequential phases in Waterfall model are

Requirement gathering and analysis:

All possible requirements of system need to be developed are captured in this phase and documented in a requirement specification document.   

System design:

The specifications which we used in first phase of requirement gathering are studied in this phase and system design is prepared. This system design helps in specifying system requirement and hardware and helps in defining the overall system architecture.

Implementation:

After gathering the inputs from system design, the system is first developed in small programs called units, which are integrated in next units. 

Integration and Testing:

The units which are developed in the implementation phase are integrated into a system after testing of each unit thoroughly. After that the entire system is tested for any failures or any faults.

Deployment of system:

After completion of functional and non-functional testing, the product is deployed in the customer environment or released into the market.

Maintenance:

There is possibility that some issues can come up in the client environment. Patches are released to fix those issues. To enhance the product, some better versions are released. With the help of maintenance step in SDLC, these changes in the customer environment is delivered.

Search Tags:

Software development life cycle | sdlc tutorials | sdlc waterfall | sdlc phases with examples | sdlc agile | sdlc phases with exmaples | sdlc model | sdlc pdf | types of sdlc | sdlc ppt | software testing training | software testing tutorials |