SDLC: 6 Popular Software

Development Life Cycle Stages & Methods What Is SDLC

SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle) is a series of systematic software creation processes to develop applications and websites with the best quality, efficient costs, and effective time. SDLC consists of a detailed plan that explains how to plan, build, and maintain software. Each SDLC phase has its own processes and results that are fed into the next phase.

Why SDLC is Important for the Product Development Process

• Mapping out detailed project planning, scheduling, and estimation
• Providing a framework for a series of activities and deliverables
• Can be used as a mechanism for tracking and controlling projects
• Increasing visibility of project planning to all stakeholders involved in the development process
• Increasing the speed of the development process
• Helps reduce project risk and overhead of project management plans

SDLC Stages

Requirement / Needs Analysis

This stage is led by seniors with input from stakeholders. At this stage the developer team will collect and analyze user needs, to be formed into requirements or desired requirements and standards. The requirements will be compiled in SRS or BRD documentation.

• SRS (Software Requirement Specifications) is a document that contains all functional and non-functional requirements and techniques of the software to be built or developed. SRS is usually created by a Programmer which is then submitted to the Developer.
• BRD (Business Requirement Document) is a document that contains functional specifications of the software and all needs and requirements submitted by the user. BRD is usually created by a Business Analyst which is submitted to management.

This stage provides a clearer picture of the overall scope of the project, the problems to be solved, opportunities, and risks that may arise in the development process later.

Design

At this stage, the designer prepares system and software design documents, in accordance with the previous stage’s requirement specification documents. This document helps to determine the overall system architecture. This design phase also serves as input for the next model phase.

The designs created by the UI/UX Designer team are as follows:

• Designing User Interface
• Designing Data Flow (Data Flow Diagram)
• Creating Process Diagram
• Not only for designers, this stage is also used by the Product team to:
• Determine work priorities
• Compile Product Roadmap
• Request approval from stakeholders
• This will help the entire team, both the developer team and the product team to
• get a clearer picture of their goals.

After the system design stage is complete, we will enter the longest phase in the SDLC, namely coding. In this phase, the developer team begins to implement programming language scripts or coding, to build the entire system.in the coding phase, tasks are divided into units or modules and assigned to various developers. The end result of this stage is a source code for the software that has been created.

• Testing / Testing

When the software is finished being developed, it’s time for us to test whether this product is running well. The application or website testing stage is to ensure that our product is running well according to user needs. This testing involves mainly Quality Assurance (QA), the developer team, and can also involve users who will use the product.-QA must ensure that the software developed meets the requirements. During this phase, QA may find some bugs / defects, errors, freezes that they will later communicate to the developer. The developer team then fixes the bugs and sends them back to QA for retesting. This process continues until the software is completely bug free, stable, and works according to the requirements.

• Deployment

At this stage after the team has resolved the issues or fixed bugs and defects, our application or website is ready to be released to the market for use by users.

• Maintenance

After deployment and users start using the product that has been developed, there will be at least the following 3 activities that occur:

• Bug fixing: bugs are reported due to several scenarios that may not have been tested at all
• Upgrade: Upgrading the application to the latest software version

Enhancement: Adding new features to existing software

The main focus of this phase is to ensure that needs continue to be met and the system continues to work according to the specifications planned in the requirement phase.

• SDLC Approach or Method

Here are some of the most popular SDLC methods in software engineering:

1. Waterfall

This approach is done linearly-sequentially or runs straight like a waterfall that falls straight, from the beginning to the end.

In the SDLC waterfall method, the results of one phase become input for the next phase. The waterfall method is also documentation-intensive, because in the early phase we document a lot of what needs to be done in the next phase.

2. Agile

An iterative or repetitive principle, also known as an agile approach because it is able to adapt to user feedback at the Testing stage. The Agile method divides the entire project into smaller incremental cycles or builds and is provided in iterations of one to three weeks.

The Agile method uses practices that encourage continuous interaction of development and testing during the SDLC process, so this model can deliver products very quickly.

3. Incremental

Basically, this method is a series of waterfall models, so it is not a different or separate model from waterfall. At the beginning of this series, requirements will be divided into several groups to develop software. The incremental process will be repeated, so that it will produce more functionality until all requirements are met from all groups.

4. Method V

Testing and development of the V method are planned in parallel. The V method provides a verification phase and a validation phase and this model will join the coding phase.

5. Spiral

The Spiral method is a combination of rapid prototyping and concurrency in risk-driven design and development. This method adopts elements from one or more other SDLC methods such as waterfall, incremental, agile, and others which are the best features.

6. Big Bang

This method focuses on all existing resources with minimal or even no planning requirements. This method is ideal for small projects with smaller developer teams. Big Bang is also an ideal method when requirements are unknown or a final release date is not given.

That’s an explanation of SDLC and the six most popular SDLC methods. Interested in knowing how to implement and process it in real application development?

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