Software Development Life Cycle

SDLC plays an important role in software development and testing. SDLC stands for Software Development Life Cycle and also referred as application development life cycle. It is a step by step process to develop a software in systems engineering, software engineering and describes a step by step process for planning, designing, testing and deployment for a software system. The SDLC intends to deliver an astounding software product that meets to client needs within time and cost estimates.

SDLC or Software Development Process, defines phases in the development of software product. The SDLC process varies from model to model and there are various types of software development models like Waterfall model, Spiral model, Agile and V model.

There are six phases in software development life cycle:

Requirement Gathering

The first phase in software development life cycle is requirement gathering. It is done by the senior officials of the teams from development, testing and business with inputs from the client and domain experts in the organization. All the collected information is then used to plan the basic project approach and to conduct product feasibility study, operational and technical areas.

Analysis & Design

Once the requirement gathering phase is completed then the next phase is to analyze the requirements and create designs. In this collected requirements clearly defined and documented and then get them approved from the client or the market investigators. Documentation design is performed by business team. Business analysts design some high level and low level documents like BRS (Business Requirement Specification), FRS (Functional Requirement Specification) and SRS (Software Requirement Specification) which consists all the requirements information of the product to be designed and developed.

During Analysis of the requirements various versions of the documents are released. Requirements may get change and increase or decrease from version to version.

Versions are like BRS_Version_1.1, BRS_Version_1.2 and so on

(Testers design test scenarios and test cases through these high level and low level documents).

 High Level Design (“Components, Interfaces, Packages) Low Level Design (“Class, Operations, relationship”)

Implementation

Once the Analysis & Design is completed the next stage in SDLC is Implementation and Development. This is the stage of SDLC where actual implementation starts and the software product is developed. Software product is built as per the business, functional and system requirements recorded during analysis and design phase. In this phase Development, Network and Database design teams perform the major work on the project. All the parts or modules of application are designed, developed and integrated. Various programming languages like JAVA, .NET, PHP, C++ are used for development. Programming language is selected as per the software requirements being develop.

Testing

Once the development is completed the next phase in SDLC is testing. Test engineer and QA perform testing of the developed software as per designed test scenarios and test cases. Testing team uses valid and invalid test data to validate and verify the end to end functionality of application.Variuos testing methodologies like system testing, Integration testing, acceptance testing, performance testing and so on are used in the different phases of the testing with the purpose to find errors, bugs and defects to make sure that the developed software meets to the business goals.

Deployment

The fifth phase in SDLC is deployment. Once testing is completed and sign-off is provided to client or business then the developed software is ready to deploy into production environment. Once the application deployed to production it is ready to use by end user or customer. Vendor perform script installation and provide release notes and training manuals to business and client.

Maintenance

 The last and sixth phase in SDLC is Maintenance. Application deployment in production doesn’t mean that the testing will stop here. Testing team gets the production issues from production and support and raise production bugs and defects retest them and make sure that application functioning properly in production.Performance of the system is verified. Implemented CR (Change requests) tested and released in production to meet additional user requirements.


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