Software Development Life Cycle

Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) is not a new term but crucial for every beginner who wants to enter to the software industry. It could be explained as a process used to plan, develop, maintain and replace (if needed) a particular software product or project. Thus so, every software project member is required to follow this procedure to achieve a high-quality product as well as meet customer expectations within a feasible timeline at the lowest cost. 

There are 6 stages, accordingly required to go through under SDLC:

1. Requirement Analysis
2. Design
3. Implementation/Coding
4. Testing
5. Deployment
6. Maintenance

1. Requirement Analysis

Before getting started into the development phase, collecting the requirements from managers, stakeholders and users is needed. In this stage, the testing team reviews the requirements and then, analyses it to see what are testable and how to test them.
The purpose of this stage is to check the logical functional relationship between modules to identify defects in the early stage. After this stage, Requirement Specification Document is created and becomes the guideline for the next phases.

2. Design

This is the second phase of the software development lifecycle. In this phase, the System Architecture of the project is designed. The High-level design and Low-level design are designed based on the requirements created in the first phase of this life cycle. This phase can help get rid of possible flaws in by setting a standard and attempting to stick to it.
After this phase, the design documentation is created to serve as the input the next phase.

3. Implementation/Coding

As mentioned above, Design documentation is used as input of this phase. Developers use it to develop the software product, they break the design into separate modules to work on it. Once they have finished, all modules will be integrated together into one system.
Base on the product, coding language is chosen to develop the software. It can be JAVA, PHP, C++,… Code merge can be done easily if there is more than one developer working on the same software product at the same time as, during this phase, developers have to follow the Coding standards and guidelines.
The next phase will use the Code documentation created in this phase as its input.

4. Testing

The next stage in the software development lifecycle is the Testing phase. In this phase, various types of test are performed to ensure that the software product meets the customer needs. All the defects, issues and bugs are tracked, reported, fixed and retested. Once the software product is tested successfully, it is ready to be released.

5. Deployment

After successfully testing the software product, it will be deployed in the market to the customers. But before the final deployment, User acceptance testing or Beta testing is performed to make sure that the product can handle required tasks in real-world scenarios as per specifications. Any changes, enhancements or any issues will be reported to the engineering team so that they can change or fix it. After these changes are made, the product will be ready for the final deployment.

6. Maintenance

After the product goes into production, all the issues arising in this stage will be addressed by the maintenance team. As the product is always enhanced and upgraded to meet customer’s needs, the news defects or issues arising from enhancing it are inevitable, or the defects unidentified in the testing stage will all be handled during this stage.

SDLC Models

There are different Software Development Life Cycle Models designed to meet the business needs, to work with available resources, programming language or toolkit. Each one follows its own steps to ensure the success of the software development process. Below are the most popular SDLC Models used in the process of software development:

• Waterfall Model
• V-Shaped Model
• Evolutionary Prototyping Model
• Spiral Method (SDM)
• Iterative and Incremental Method
• Agile development

Read more: 4 Levels of Software Testing & Advantages