Everything You Need to Know About the Software Development Lifecycle: The Complete Guide in 2021

Software is the epitome of complexity. However complex, it may be, it must be flexible, easy to maintain, and easy to improve. How can this be achieved? Planning every step of the software development process is a prerequisite for a successful product.

Understanding the concept of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) is a great starting point for planning any IT project. This article aims to cover the concept of SDLC, its stages, and methodologies.

Table of contents:

• Definition and reasons for choosing SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle).
• 7 stages of SDLC
• More about each of the stages
• Final Words

What is SDLC?

The Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) is a series of sequential phases that ensure the quality and correctness of the created software with all the necessary and additional functions and an intuitive user interface. The SDLC begins with the decision to build the software and ends with its decommissioning. It consists of a set of tasks that must be completed at each stage of development.

The development cycle ensures that the final digital product meets the expectations of the client and the development team, delivering planned features, speed, performance, and more.

The maintenance phase continues throughout its life to keep it up to date with the latest technology and tools.

Why IT projects need SDLC? This is probably the only way to ensure that the resulting software meets the requirements of the business and its users. Poorly planned software projects get out of hand. Violation of budget and deadlines. Uncertainty about the future of the project grows, hasty decisions, and futile attempts are made in the hope of taking control of the project. With SDLC, customers can enjoy a predictable development process. For software developers, this means seeing the big picture and understanding what they are doing and why.

Take a look at the 7 Stages of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC)

Let’s take a closer look at each of these stages.

Stage-1: the stage of creating an idea or collecting requirements

The first stage of the SDLC mainly involves a detailed discussion of the requirements with stakeholders and industry experts. Alternatively, business analysts can use information from clients. Based on a detailed discussion, an approximate view of the final software is being developed.

After this stage, everyone should have a clear understanding of the project scope, budget, resources, and timeline, as well as possible risks and quality assurance requirements.

All requirements are set out in the Software Requirements Specification (SRS). This document will be used frequently by project managers, business analysts, and software developers. However, the team is finalizing them at the stage of a feasibility study.

Stage-2: Stage of approval of the feasibility study

After completing the requirements analysis phase, the next step in the SDLC is to identify and document the software needs. This process is accomplished through the “Software Requirements Specification document”, also known as the SRS document. It includes everything that needs to be designed and developed during the project life cycle.

5 types of feasibility checks:

• Economic: Can we complete the project on budget or not?
• Can we view this project as cyber law and other regulatory frameworks/conformity?
• Feasibility of the operation: can we create the operations that are expected from the client?
• Technical: It is necessary to check if the current computer system supports the software.
• Schedule: Decide if the project can be completed within the given schedule or not.

Stage-3: Design

In this third step, the system and software design documentation is prepared by the requirements specification document. This helps define the overall architecture of the system.

This design phase serves as input to the next phase of the model.

At this stage, two types of project documentation are developed:

Stage-4: Development Stage

After completing the system design phase, the next step is coding. During the SDLC coding phase, the development team brings the designed product to life. The team either writes code from scratch or relies on frameworks to speed things up. During the coding phase, tasks are divided into blocks or modules and assigned to different developers. The longest stage of the software development life cycle is performed in a pre-planned programming language.

Stage-5: Quality assurance and testing of the developed product.

After the development team finishes coding the software, the QA team checks it for bugs and issues. This is done to ensure that the entire application works as per customer requirements.

If any error occurs, it is returned to the development team. After fixing the bug, the QA team needs to retest it. Quality assurance is an ongoing process that continues until the software is completely bug-free and compliant.

• Unit Testing: Each module or group of related modules is tested for expected results. If there is a flaw in any of them, the developer should fix it.
• Regression testing: a set of tests aimed at detecting defects in already tested areas of the application. This is done to make sure that fixing some bugs did not cause others to appear and that the update of the build did not create new defects in the already tested code.
• Performance Testing: Aimed at figuring out how the software performs under workload (speed, responsiveness, and stability).
• Security Testing: As the name suggests, this type of testing aims to verify the security of a system.
• Usability Testing: This type involves testing custom components to find out if the software is intuitive, easy to use.

Stage-6: Deployment of the final version of the software.

This is the stage in which the actual installation of the generated solution takes place. This is done in stages according to the implementation plan. The newly created and tested application is moved to production, including data and component transfers, while only certain changes will be deployed in future releases. Depending on the complexity of the project, this can be a simple release (if the project is simple) or a phased release (in stages) for a more complex project. Now system analysts and end-users can see and try out the finished application.

Stage 7: Support

After the system is deployed and customers start using the developed system, the following 3 actions are performed:

• Bug fixes related to some scripts that have not been tested at all.
• Integration of additional features to improve software performance.
• Updating software for updated platforms.

The focus of this SDLC phase is on ensuring that needs continue to be met and that the system continues to operate according to the specification mentioned in the first phase.

Final Words

SDLC is a multi-step process that includes planning, design, implementation, development, testing, and system maintenance.

The system in question is created per the requirements collected during the SDLC process.

The final system is designed according to the needs of the end-users, and the performance standards are assessed based on the product’s compliance with SDD requirements.

SDLC helps developers better assess and meet the needs of their customers. Although the process is rigorous and requires a specific number of steps to be followed in a specific order, it ensures that the final system delivered is one of the best.

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