Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC)

What is a Life Cycle:

We can say it is like, Series of stages a living thing goes through during its life (Step by step). All Humans, plants and animals go through this cycle. Every Life cycles repeat again and again. According to the human life cycle, we have several stages like Infancy, Childhood, Adolescence, Adulthood, Middle Age, and Old Age.

What is Software Development Life Cycle:

SDLC or Software Development Life Cycle is a series of stages in the software application development process. In another way, we can say it like this, SDLC is a structured process that can create a high-quality, low-cost software application within a less production period. SDLC is used the design the software and test high-quality software.

SDLC has six steps: Planning, Design, Development, Testing, Deployment, and Maintenance. We hope to discuss all these six steps in detail within this post. When we do some projects, some project managers will combine, split or omit steps when we do some tasks. It depends on the project’s scope.

Planning Stage:

This is the most fundamental stage in SDLC. In this stage, project leaders assess the terms of the project and create a project plan. In this planning stage, we also collect feedback from stakeholders. Planning stage, we define the scope and purpose correctly of the software that we will go to create. In this stage, we represent the various technical approaches because using these technical approaches, we can implement the project successfully with minimum risk.

In this planning stage, we define the requirements for our project are;

Define Requirements; In this part, we determine what kind of things the system is supposed to do. We define the two requirements. Those are,

Functional requirements & Non-Functional Requirments.

If we collect all the requirements, we can create a high-quality application. This requirement gathers through an SRS (Software Requirement Specification) document, which consists of all the application requirements to be designed and developed during the project life cycle.

Design & Prototyping Stage:

In this design stage, we represent the way of software works. This phase includes the business rules, Pseudo-code, Screen layout (Framework) and other documents like DDS (Design Document Specification).

Two activities involved in the design phase,

Designing the IT infrastructure.

Design The system Model.

In this design stage, we define our software will run on which kind of platforms such as an Apple, Android, Windows version or Linux, or even gaming consoles. Further, we define the programming language and methods of solving problems and performing tasks in the application.

And also, define the methods by which the application can communicate with other assets, such as a central server or other instances of the application. We make sure to secure our application at this stage.

Software Development Stage:

In this stage, we actually start to develop our application and product build. According to our DDS, programming code is generated in this stage. Developers must follow the coding guidelines and use programming tools (compiler, interpreters, debuggers) for generating the code. They use high-level programming languages such as C++, Python, Java and PHP for coding.

When we work on a large project, we divided as teams and work together. We use an access control or source code management application in this phase.

Testing Stage:

In the modern SDLC models, this stage is a subset of all the stages because this testing activity is involved in all the phases of the SDLC. However, testing the application is essential before it is available to users. In this testing stage, we can do automated testing. Testing should ensure that each functional and non-functional requirements work correctly or not. This testing stage helps reduce the number of bugs and leads to high user satisfaction.

Deployment:

In this phase, the software is made available to users. In this Deployment stage, all data and components are present in the production environment. Most companies prefer to automated deployment phase.

Deployment can be complex when upgrading a company-wide database to a newly-developed application.

Operation & Maintenance:

In this stage, Software Development Life Cycle is almost finished, and the application is used. But this phase is practically important because when users use the application, they find some bugs that we couldn’t find in our testing phase. Then in this stage, we resolved the bugs and maintain the application.