SDLC Software Development Life Cycle

If you haven’t yet started your journey as a software developer, you might ask yourself, “Is software development for me? ” Here are some signs that this career path might be one that you will enjoy. The System Development Life Cycle encompasses a series of interconnected stages that ensure a systematic approach to system development. The stages include Planning, Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, and Maintenance. Each stage contributes to the successful completion of the system, with System Design serving as a crucial component.

This requires a lot of research and planning to ensure that your final product meets your expectations (and those of your customers). The big step is creating a detailed project plan document and work breakdown structure that outlines the requirements. System Design is a critical stage in the SDLC, where the requirements gathered during the Analysis phase are translated into a detailed technical plan. It involves designing the system’s architecture, database structure, and user interface, and defining system components. The Design stage lays the foundation for the subsequent development and implementation phases. The NIST SDLC integrates risk management activities through the application of the NIST RMF.

Benefits of a Well-Defined System Development Life Cycle

Learn what the seven stages of SDLC are and how they help developers bring new software products to life. An output artifact does not need to be completely defined to serve as input of object-oriented design; analysis and design may occur in parallel. In practice the results of one activity can feed the other in an iterative process.

It’s mostly used to develop broad ideas when the customer or client isn’t sure what they want. Developers must now move into a maintenance mode and begin practicing any activities required to handle issues reported by end-users. Once complete, development managers will prepare a design document to be referenced throughout the next phases of the SDLC. Additionally, the development phase marks the initiation of the second section of the project.

What is the need for SDLC?

Share your plan with your team and key stakeholders to provide visibility, and assign tasks to individuals to ensure nothing slips through the cracks. Regardless of the process implemented and the tools used, all require the crucial element of documentation to support findings, close iterative phases, and to analyze success. Today’s increasing demand for data and information security also factor into the overall planning, training, testing, and deployment of a system. In order to understand the concept of system development life cycle, we must first define a system.

phases of the system development life cycle

Other SDLC models include rapid application development (RAD), joint application development (JAD), the fountain model, the spiral model, build and fix, and synchronize-and-stabilize. The abbreviation SDLC can sometimes phases of the system development life cycle refer to the systems development lifecycle, the process for planning and creating an IT system. The system typically consists of several hardware and software components that work together to perform complex functions.

Phases of System Development Life Cycle

During this stage of the system lifecycle, subsystems that perform the desired system functions are designed and specified in compliance with the system specification. Object-oriented analysis and design (OOAD) is the process of analyzing a problem domain to develop a conceptual model that can then be used to guide development. During the analysis phase, a programmer develops written requirements and a formal vision document via interviews with stakeholders. The development stage is when programmers write code and build the application based on the design papers and specifications that were created earlier.

  • In this phase of SDLC, the actual development begins, and the programming is built.
  • They will look at how to best integrate the new software into any existing IT infrastructure the organization may have.
  • Conceptually, the design flows from one phase down to the next, like that of a waterfall.
  • This word has been around for many decades and stems from a time when organizations were much more centralized.
  • The testing is continued until the end-user finds it acceptable and it may be repeated to check for interoperability, errors, and bugs.

The system integration and system testing are done in the fifth phase of the system development life cycle. This phase is normally carried out by Quality Assurance professionals to determine if the proposed design meets the initial business goals. The project manager is the overall control agent for a strong SDLC process. System assessments are conducted in order to correct deficiencies and adapt the system for continued improvement.

The stages of SDLC are as follows:

This includes all the specifications for software, hardware, and network requirements for the system they plan to build. This will prevent them from overdrawing funding or resources when working at the same place as other development teams. With its customizable spreadsheet interface and powerful collaboration features, Smartsheet allows for streamlined project and process management. Use Smartsheet’s SDLC with Gantt template to get started quickly, and help manage the planning, development, testing, and deployment stages of system development. Create a timeline with milestones and dependencies to track progress, and set up automated alerts to notify you as anything changes.

phases of the system development life cycle

Want to improve application quality and monitor application performance at every stage of the SDLC? Try out Stackify’s Retrace tool for free and experience how it can help your organization at producing higher-quality software. Each phase has its own mini-plan and each phase “waterfalls” into the next. The biggest drawback of this model is that small details left incomplete can hold up the entire process.

History and Origin of the System Development Lifecycle

Failure to take into account the needs of customers and all users and stakeholders can result in a poor understanding of the system requirements at the outset. The most flexible of the SDLC models, the spiral model is similar to the iterative model in its emphasis on repetition. The spiral model goes through the planning, design, build and test phases over and over, with gradual improvements at each pass. It’s also important to know that there is a strong focus on the testing phase. As the SDLC is a repetitive methodology, you have to ensure code quality at every cycle.

phases of the system development life cycle

The agile model is relatively well-known, particularly in the software development industry. This can include handling residual bugs that were not able to be patched before launch or resolving new issues that crop up due to user reports. Larger systems may require longer maintenance stages compared to smaller systems. During the testing stage, developers will go over their software with a fine-tooth comb, noting any bugs or defects that need to be tracked, fixed, and later retested.

Steps to Secure the SDLC

The software development lifecycle (SDLC) is the cost-effective and time-efficient process that development teams use to design and build high-quality software. The goal of SDLC is to minimize project risks through forward planning so that software meets customer expectations during production and beyond. This methodology outlines a series of steps that divide the software development process into tasks you can assign, complete, and measure. Like other data-related projects, the activities in the analysis phase should include profiling the data in the source and target data structures.