System / Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC)

Once upon a time, software development consisted of a programmer writing code to solve a problem or automate a procedure. Nowadays, systems are so big and complex that teams of architects, analysts, programmers, testers and users must work together to create the millions of lines of custom-written code that drive our enterprises.

To manage this, a number of system development life cycles (SDLC) models have been created:

• General Model
• Waterfall
• Fountain
• Spiral
• Build and fix
• Prototyping
• RAD Model
• Incremental
• Synchronize and stabilize.

GENERAL MODEL:
Software life cycle models describe phases of the software cycle and the order in which those phases are executed. There are tons of models, and many companies adopt their own, but all have very similar patterns. The general, basic model is shown below:
General Life Cycle Model
Each phase produces deliverables required by the next phase in the life cycle. Requirements are translated into design. Code is produced during implementation that is driven by the design. Testing verifies the deliverable of the implementation phase against requirements.

Requirements:
Business requirements are gathered in this phase. This phase is the main focus of the project managers and stake holders. Meetings with managers, stake holders and users are held in order to determine the requirements. Who is going to use the system? How will they use the system? What data should be input into the system? What data should be output by the system? These are general questions that get answered during a requirements gathering phase. This produces a nice big list of functionality that the system should provide, which describes functions the system should perform, business logic that processes data, what data is stored and used by the system, and how the user interface should work. The overall result is the system as a whole and how it performs, not how it is actually going to do it.

Design:
The software system design is produced from the results of the requirements phase. Architects have the ball in their court during this phase and this is the phase in which their focus lies. This is where the details on how the system will work is produced. Architecture, including hardware and software, communication, software design (UML is produced here) are all part of the deliverables of a design phase.

Implementation:
Code is produced from the deliverables of the design phase during implementation, and this is the longest phase of the software development life cycle. For a developer, this is the main focus of the life cycle because this is where the code is produced. Implementation my overlap with both the design and testing phases. Many tools exists (CASE tools) to actually automate the production of code using information gathered and produced during the design phase.

Testing:
During testing, the implementation is tested against the requirements to make sure that the product is actually solving the needs addressed and gathered during the requirements phase. Unit tests and system/acceptance tests are done during this phase. Unit tests act on a specific component of the system, while system tests act on the system as a whole.