Software Development Life Cycle

 

The software development life cycle (SDLC) is a set of stages that defines the process by which a software project moves from requirements gathering, design, coding, and testing through deployment to maintenance. Each stage has its own purpose and depends on the previous one.

Requirements analysis

The requirements analysis phase is where you define the problem, define the solution and identify stakeholders. You also identify risks and define the requirements.

The requirements are then broken down into detail such as scope, architecture, and schedule. The budget can be estimated at this point as well if necessary

Design

Design is the process of defining the architecture, components, interfaces, and other characteristics of a system or component. Designing software is an iterative process that involves multiple steps:

• Articulating needs and requirements.

• Defining user stories and functional specifications based on those needs and requirements.

• Creating prototypes to test usability before proceeding with more expensive software development efforts (e.g., writing code).

Implementation (coding)

You may have heard of the term “implementation”, but what does it mean? Implementation is the process of coding. Coding is a series of instructions that tell a computer what to do. It's also called programming or scripting, depending on how many people are doing it (more than one person can be responsible for writing code).

The most creative part of development is coding because you get to invent new things and make them work in your program. It's also technical because you need knowledge about algorithms and data structures, which means knowing what different types of data look like and how they store information within themselves—basically, all the math involved with raw bytes!

Testing

• Functional testing: Tests to ensure that the system performs its functions as expected.

• Performance testing: Tests to ensure that the system runs at peak performance, i.e., that it can handle a given load without slowing down or crashing due to overload.

• Security testing: Tests designed to confirm that your code is secure and free of any vulnerabilities before releasing it into production environments where users might access it or use some of its functionality (e.g., login).

• Stability testing: A type of regression test that checks for incorrect behaviors after making changes in your source codebase such as adding new features or fixing bugs in existing ones—it's an essential step before deploying any change into production!

Deployment

Deployment is the process of making software available to end users. This can be done through several means, such as:

• Using a CD or DVD in a computer that has been loaded with your program

• Installing it on another computer (or computers) using an installer package, which is usually stored on a floppy disk or USB drive.

• Downloading and installing from the developer's website directly onto your own machine

Maintenance and bug fixing

• Fixing bugs

• Improving existing code

• Updating code to reflect new requirements

Each phase depends on the prior phase.

Each phase depends on the prior phase. The earlier a phase, the more expensive it is to change. The later this phase, the more expensive it is to change.

The earlier a phase, the more important it is to get it right. The later this phase, the less critical it becomes that your solution is perfect from start to finish (and therefore less costly).

Conclusion

You can see that each phase of the software development life cycle is dependent on the previous. They all must be done in order to produce a good quality product.