SDLC Overview: Models & Methodologies (original) (raw)

1. Requirements

This is one of the most important software development life cycle phases where stakeholders sit down to discuss the purpose of the software. What goal is the software intended to achieve and what are the required specifications to fulfill that goal? This stage also enables the team to identify and address every possible problem early in the development process.

2. Planning

Once the requirement phase is done, it is time to start planning the entire software development lifecycle process. This is where a team of business analysts, product managers, engineers and quality assurance personnel all sit down and analyze the required resources, risks, and costs involved in the process, as well as determining how to overcome those risks. The team looks at the needed technologies, features, project constraints, available budget, and the timeline for when the project needs to be completed.

This stage will help you build a system that adds analytics and issue tracking management. This will be beneficial to both your team and the users. In this stage, developers also have the opportunity to plan and release a minimum viable product (MVP) without putting more time into unnecessary work.

In this digital era, companies need to do away with the fly-by-night approach which yields low-quality results. Instead they must turn to a process that will help build and support a successful project in the long run. This is where SDLC proves to be beneficial. At this stage, it is crucial to have an MVP as it allows for agile development cycles. This also implies that your product attracts users faster who can provide crucial feedback which in turn will help you improve your offering during the next development cycle. An MVP helps you strip all the extra features away and build them over time while working on the next cycle. This ensures a faster turnaround time and allows your team to get a product that you can then flesh out at the same time.

3. Designing

After planning, it’s time to get to work with the third step which is designing. This is where the product managers, UX/UI designers and developers sit down to design the different parts of the software based on each requirement. The design phase covers components such as the architecture, user interface, security, and the programming languages that will be used to write the software. In the end, the design is intended to describe how the front-end of the application will look, behave, and communicate with the database.

4. Prototyping

This is the MVP stage where a test sample is produced to showcase the overall concept of the project. The purpose of the prototype sample is to test the design and user. It will also give a clear picture of whether the original idea was good or bad. So, the client will determine what changes need to be made to make the product better.

5. Developing

After the prototype is tested and confirmed, it is development time. This phase is where all the engineers follow a blueprint for creating the software based on the requirements. This blueprint describes a well-defined file nomenclature, coding, and naming styles. It is Important to note that the whole process is divided into sprints.

6. Testing

After developing the prototype version of the software, it’s time to test it. It is important to always test every new product to find out if there are deficiencies and defects. Some of those are blind spots to developers during the development stage. But when the QA specialists test the software, it will discover every error, allowing them to fix before launching the software.

7. Delivery

After testing and fixing every glitch here and there, it’s time to deliver. Here the software is delivered to the client’s recommended deployment environment for users to start using. At this point, different clients may have additional delivery requirements. Some may want the software to be pre-launched for stakeholders to test and try it out before it is fully launched into the market. Others may want it to be launched directly into the marketplace while keeping a close watch on errors and fixes.

8. Maintenance

Nothing is always perfect at first sight. Each phase of the software development life cycle has a crucial role to play. Therefore, each product deployment has a maintenance team ready to respond to any technical or post-production emergency. In the event of an issue, the maintenance team immediately intervenes with the solution.