UNDERSTANDING SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT LIFE CYCLE

In todays cyber world we are driven with a technical life style which introduces software to be an integral part in our day to day life. It is hardly possible to imagine our every day life with out any computerized process. When we closely observe the applications that we use daily we all get a common doubt that, how were these applications are developed and what is the process behind them? Let me explain you about the process of developing a software keenly.

SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT LIFE CYCLE:

Whenever there is a need for sophisticated system or an end user web or a mobile application we have to design a procedure which describes the whole process of development from starting stage to final stage. Similarly, Software development life cycle is also a methodology or a set of principles that should be followed in every software development team as preliminary steps to development a software.

This software development life cycle organizes the whole work process of the project into different stages which simplifies the work in order to complete it in the desired dead lines and it also focusses on the cost of project development. According to the project type we can apply different software development life cycles. The different SDLC processes applied by the companies are Agile model, RAD model, Waterfall model, Spiral model etc…. Though there are different models for the different kinds of projects, we use the following stages most frequently.

THE STAGES OF SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT LIFE CYCLE:

1) BRAIN STORMING (OR) PLANNING: This is the first and fore most step in the software development life cycle process. This stage include brain storming session and then the development team finalizes an idea to proceed further into the project. After the completion of brain storming the team plans about the initial and core stages of the project and they also set the time frames and strategies to complete the project. When the prerequisite stage is perfectly completed then only the can move to the requirements stage.

2) DEFINING REQUIREMENTS: In this stage the team understands the project in deeper and classifies the requirements according to the stages of the project development and also in this stage only the team analyzes the future risks of the project and comes to a conclusion on the overall cost of the project.

3) DESIGN: Software design is the most complicated stage in the project development cycle. During this phase the team conceptualizes the created solution and verifies that whether the created solution meets the requirements or not. In this stage the team concentrates on the functionality of the solution and also analyze the structure capabilities, objectives of the proposed solution. After identifying a certain design for the development of software team forward in to development stage.

4) DEVELOPMENT: The development stage is all about converting the design into the actual software through coding. This stage of the development cycle is the longest path as it is the back bone of the whole project and the software development team should have to verify the code constantly to meet the requirements of the project. Once the development of complete architecture of the solution is completed. The team proceeds to the testing stage.

5) TESTING: In this stage the developed solution is tested under different methods in order to fix the bugs in the code and all the verified code at different stages are integrated in this stage. The testing stage is mainly useful for checking the quality of developed code prior to its release.

6) IMPLEMENTATION & MAINTENANCE: Once the software is certified with out having any errors or bugs then the team will release the developed software to production environment. This means the developed software product can be used by customers. Though the software is implemented also the development team must focus on the maintenance of the software in order to fix the bugs and update the new features.

These are the stages that are commonly used in every software development life cycle by a developer team. This SDLC process is use full to make perfect time frames for the completion of desired software product and also SDLC gives a perfect figure about total cost accomplished for the development of the project at every stage. Finally, SDLC is a process which sets the whole work in an organized and simplified manner.