System Development Life Cycle

SDLC is used by system analysts for the development and alteration of information systems. For successful development of any system, proper management of System Development Life Cycle is very critical. Software Development Life Cycle or SDLC can also be regarded as a concept of providing complete support to a product, all the way through its phases of evolution and maintenance. There are various stages included in the process of Software Development Life Cycle that are:

1. Feasibility Study: Feasibility Study is carried out at the initial stage of the SDLC to get the high level view of the project. This stage sets the entire path of the process of development and produces project plan, estimated time and budget for entire system development.

2. Requirement Analysis: Requirement Analysis phase defines the project goals and requirements of the organization for which the system is going to be developed. All the information regarding the need and system operations is documented for usage in next stages. End user information is collected so that system can be designed according to its need. The document prepared after this phase is known SRS (System Requirement Specifications).

3. System Design: System Design focuses on high level design such as which program codes should be written and how they are going to be in interaction, low Level Design of individual program codes and how those programs are going to work. Designing of the Interface, how system is going to look like and what data is required in data design. Business rules, pseudo code and other documentation are designed in this phase.

4. Coding and Implementation: The real code and programming of the system code is carried out in this phase. Coding of individual modules as well as integrated programs is done in coding phase.

5. Integration and Testing: All individual pieces of code are collected and integrated into sub systems and sub systems are further combined to form the system. Testing of system code and its modules is performed in this phase of SDLC. Testing is divided into two types on the basis of its functionality:

• Black Box Testing: In Black box Testing, only the functionality of the system is tested. It is done on the basis of verifying output result generated on applying certain input data. It doesn't test the inner working of system components or system modules.

• White Box Testing: In White Box Testing, inner modules and individual components are tested for bugs and errors. After individual components, integrated sub systems are tested.

6. Acceptance, installation, deployment: It's the final phase of development process. In this phase the system is introduced to the production environment and the system is also made available to various clients before the actual implementation for Beta testing. Beta testing ensures that if there are any modifications required by the client they can be introduced too.

7. Maintenance: In production, system requires updates, changes and maintenance from time to time so system can work properly. This phase goes on for entire life time of the system.

Software Development Life Cycle phases are very important for developing any type of systems like mobile application development and if any of these phases are skipped, it can result in serious errors.