Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC)

Generally, in software companies, there will be two types of teams, they are: 1) development team and 2) testing team.

whatever the software or application,etc., is developed by the development team is to be tested by the testing team, but it should fulfill the client requirements. so, the process of these two teams from initial stage to the final stage, is followed by their life cycles. In this article, we discuss only about the software development life cycle and its phases. SDLC methods and software testing life cycle, will discuss in further articles.

SDLC:-

It is a systematic approach to develop a software. It describes development process of software project / product to fulfill the client requirements with in the specified cost and time.

SDLC contains following phases:

1) Business requirement specifications (BRS)

2) Analysis

3) Design

4) coding

5) Testing

6) Release & Maintenance

now, lets discuss about them in detail

1) BRS:–

In this phase, Business analyst (BA) will collect requirements with an interaction of client.

collected information will be documented as BRS.

BRS will describe brief description about client business needs like users of the application and required services for those users.

After preparation of BRS, BA will perform feasibility study to check project is acceptance or not.

In feasibility study they analyze following factors:

a) finance feasibility

b) time required to develop application

c) requirements are reliable or not in order to develop

2) Analysis:–

In this phase system analyst (SA) will analyze client requirements in BRS based on that he will prepare detailed requirements document called FUNCTIONAL REQUIREMENT SPECIFICATION (FRS)/ SYSTEM REQUIREMENT SPECIFICATION (SRS)

SRS document will describe detailed functionality of the system. In this phase SA will provide information to the client by releasing statement of work (SOW) document.

For successful project development clear FRS document is mandatory. And this SRS document is a technical document not to be given to any one. Just a one copy of document to development team and one copy to testing team will be given.

3) Design:–

In this phase design architect (DA) is responsible to prepare design document based on FRS. In this phase DA will decide architecture of application, which programming or scripting languages need to use and DB technology.

In this phase, DA will prepare following documents:-

a) Graphical user interface design doc

b) database design doc

c) Application design document (ADD)/ technical design doc:- it consists 2 levels of design. They are:

i) High level design (HLD) doc: it describes no. of modules required in the project & relation between those modules.

ii) low level design (LLD) doc: it describes internal logic of each module with help of data-flow diagrams & Entity_relative diagrams.

4) coding:–

Based on design document developer will write the programs in order to develop application.

5) Testing:–

After coding programs are available for execution developers will perform unit & integration testing using white box testing techniques. Whereas test engineer will validate whole system based on client requirements using black box testing. After system testing to know application ready for release we conduct User acceptance test (UAT) which is performed by client.

Here, these two white and black box testing will come further in testing methodologies and also system and acceptance testing will learn further in levels of testing. so don’t worry.

6) Release & Maintenance:–

Release:- After system testing & UAT, if client is satisfied with work of the product, then we deliver application to the client for further usage at alive environment with real data is called Release/ production.

Maintenance:- while using the application if client required any new features based on present situation or he may identifies any defects then he will send change request (CR) to the organization. Based initial agreements we work on CR and release modified version to the client.

NOTE:– WHEN APPLICATION NO LONGER IN USE THAT IS END STAGE FOR SDLC.

This is the general brief of SDLC, the models of SDLC will discuss in next article with more clearly.

Thank you.

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