Brief introduction to Software Development Lifecycle(SDLC)

Basics of SDLC

SDLC or Software Development Lifecycle basically have six phases to develop software with the best quality and optimized design. These phases are structured in a methodical way and could be just one-time visit to each phase or can be iterative based on the type of Software Development Lifecycle model that you are following.

It has six different stages for development of an IT Project to describe and imbibe different stages and activities involved in each step. It tends to evolve for an organization or a team as they grow and hence can be modified and improved with their experience.

SDLC Refers to Processes used to plan, create, test and deploy an information system

Contains 6 phases they are

• Planning
• Analysis
• Design
• Implementation
• Testing and Integration
• Maintenance

Planning

1. Define the problem and scope of existing system.

2. Overview the new system and determine its objectives.

3. Confirm project feasibility and produce the project Schedule.

4. During this phase, threats, constraints, integration and security of system are also considered.

5. A feasibility report for the entire project is created at the end of this phase.

Analysis

1. Gather, analyze, and validate the information.

2. Define the requirements and prototypes for new system.

3. Evaluate the alternatives and prioritize the requirements.

4. Examine the information needs of end-user and enhances the system goal.

5. A Software Requirement Specification (SRS) document, which specifies the software, hardware, functional, and network requirements of the system is prepared at the end of this phase.

Design

1. Includes the design of application, network, databases, user interfaces, and system interfaces.

2. Transform the SRS document into logical structure, which contains detailed and complete set of specifications that can be implemented in a programming language.

3. Create a contingency, training, maintenance, and operation plan.

4. Review the proposed design. Ensure that the final design must meet the requirements stated in SRS document.

5. Finally, prepare a design document which will be used during next phases.

Implementation

1. Implement the design into source code through coding.

2. Combine all the modules together into training environment that detects errors and defects.

3. A test report which contains errors is prepared through test plan that includes test related tasks such as test case generation, testing criteria, and resource allocation for testing.

4. Integrate the information system into its environment and install the new system.

Testing and Integration

1. Prepare the Integration Tests Plan

2. Design the Test Scenarios, Cases, and Scripts.

3. Executing the test Cases followed by reporting the defects.

4. Tracking & re-testing the defects.

5. Steps 3 and 4 are repeated until the completion of Integration is successful.

Maintenance

1. Modification and updations done after the delivery of the software is basically what comes in the process of the maintenance.
2. It could be a routine maintenance task based on a bug discovered by the user or it may be consume more time depends upon the status of the problem.
3. The cost of maintenance is usually high as discovered by most studies.
4. Generally there are types of the maintenance and few of them are:

>Corrective Maintenance

>Adaptive Maintenance

5. Testing the changes were done during adaptive and corrective maintenance