Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC)

Here in this blog I will tell you what is software development life cycle,the phases of software development life cycle and Methods of SDLC.

What is Software Development Life Cycle?

SDLC, Software Development Life Cycle is a process used by software industry to design, develop and test high quality softwares. The SDLC aims to produce a high quality software that meets or exceeds customer expectations, reaches completion within times and cost estimates.

SDLC is a process followed for a software project, within a software organization. It consists of a detailed plan describing how to develop, maintain, replace and alter or enhance specific software. The life cycle defines a methodology for improving the quality of software and the overall development process.

There are various software development approaches defined and designed which are used/employed during development process of software, these approaches are also referred as
Software Development Process Models (SDLC MODELS) 
(e.g Waterfall model, V model, Incremental model, Spiral model)

Software life cycle models describe phases of the software cycle and the order in which those phases are executed. Each phase produces deliverables required by the next phase in the life cycle. Requirements are translated into design. Code is produced according to the design which is called development phase. After coding and development the testing verifies the deliverable of the implementation phase against requirements.

There are following six phases in every Software development life cycle model:

1. Requirement gathering and analysis
2. Design
3. Implementation or coding
4. Testing
5. Deployment
6. Maintenance

1) Requirement gathering and analysis
This phase is the main focus of the project managers and stake holders. Meetings with managers, stake holders and users are held in order to determine the requirements like; Who is going to use the system? How will they use the system?  What data should be input into the system?  What data should be output by the system?  These are general questions that get answered during a requirements gathering phase. After requirement gathering these requirements are analysing for their validity and the possibility of incorporating the requirements in the system to be development is also studied.

2) Design:  In this phase the system and software design is prepared from the requirement specifications which were studied in the first phase. System Design helps in specifying hardware and system requirements and also helps in defining overall system architecture. The system design specifications serve as input for the next phase of the model.

3) Implementation / Coding:  On receiving system design documents, the work is divided in modules/units and actual coding is started. Since, in this phase the code is produced so it is the main focus for the developer. This is the longest phase of the software development life cycle.

4)  Testing:  After the code is developed it is tested against the requirements to make sure that the product is actually solving the needs addressed and gathered during the requirements phase. During this phase unit testing, integration testing, system testing, acceptance testing are done.

5)  Deployment: After successful testing the product is delivered / deployed to the customer for their use.

6) Maintenance: Once when the customers starts using the developed system then the actual problems comes up and needs to be solved from time to time. This process where the care is taken for the developed product is known as maintenance.