What is the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC)?
Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) is a process for developing a high quality software product or business website. It maintains the detailed plan about how to implement a software, how to maintain a software or improve any software to make it better. The life cycle is followed by some methodologies which improves overall development process. Mainly it covers Planning and Requirement Analysis, Defining Requirements, Software Designing, Development, Software Testing, Deployment, Support and Maintenance.
What are the purpose of SDLC?
The main purpose of SDLC is to build a high quality software product as per the business requirement. It is very important to maintain the development by maintaining the each SDLC phases to provide the actual product otherwise it may end up with wrong product. SDLC cycle plays the process of developing software to reduce development timeline and cost. Most of the product development companies normally follows each steps as standard.
Steps of Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC)
1. Planning and Requirement Analysis –
The Requirement analysis is the important stage to start a software development and finalize the Software Requirement Specification (SRS). It conducted by the product owner or team members with the discussion with stakeholders. This stage delivers a detailed scope of the project along with feasibility analysis.
2. Design –
The system design plays a vital role for a successful software development. The software design documentation should be prepared as per the requirement along with overall system software architecture. It consists of High Level Design and Low Level Design. In high level design – system designer describes about the system modules, areas, interfaces, databases and complete system diagram. And in low level design – all the functional logic is defined, all fields of interfaces, database table with data types, validation, complete input and output with data flow.
3. Development or coding –
At this stage requirement and system design phase is done, now this is programming phase. Software developer will write code using selected programming language and framework to develop the defined software requirement in above phases. A big software may divided into multiple development teams in module wise. Team developers should follow the functional requirements and non-functional requires as defined. And developers should verify the development with product owner/stakeholders on a schedule to make sure the development is in the right way.
4. Testing –
After development, the developed software will be deployed for testing environment. Software testing team will test as per the defined test cases for both functional and non-functional requirement. This phase ensures that the usability of the software as per end user’s perspective. At this stage testing team may find some defects/bugs/issues which forwarded to development team for fixing. The testing and fixing will continue till the requirement is finally meet.
5. Deployment –
At this stage the software is ready for deployment. Team members will configure the live server to run the software. Once the product owner approved for launch then the software will be released for end users.
6. Support and Maintenance –
This is ongoing support and maintenance stage. Support team will resolve user queries and report bugs to development team if any. Take software backup on a schedule basis and upgrade software with new feature and latest technology.