The software development life cycle (SDLC) is defined as a software developing process which has a proper framework about tasks performed such as planning, creating, developing, testing and many more. SDLC is considered as a structure that is followed by developing team in an organization. In simple words we can say that it is used to describe how to develop and maintain a specific software.
Below mention are the phases/activities of software development goes through and thus the term ‘Life Cycle’ is added in Software Development Life Cycle.
- Planning:
This is one of the most important phase in software development. Skillful engineers are required to set the required analysis or required gathering. Once the requirements are gathered from the clients, scope of the project is documented. This includes the road map/mind map of the project. - Implementation:
After setting up the scope and creating mind map, developers start writing the code as per the requirement of the client. In this phase the work is divided in units and the unit testing/implementation is done to check whether everything is working properly. - Testing:
This is phase Quality Analysis (QA) find the bugs and errors. And if they find any they soon contact the developing team and they debug it or make it error free. - Documentation:
If a situation arises in future that there are few changes to be done in the software then at such moment it’s good that every step is being documented. Application Programming Interface (API) is required for design documentation. - Deployment:
After the software gets approval for release then and then only it is ready to deployed. - Maintenance:
For any future requirements software is maintained properly.
Different organizations uses different software development model for developing software. Few of them are mention below:
- Waterfall Model:
Waterfall Model finishes the each phase completely then only moves to the next phase. This model also makes sure that after completing the phase successfully it first checks whether the project is working on track and then only it likely to move on to next phase. - V-shaped Model:
This model is also similar to waterfall model i.e. it also follows the sequential of working on phase but I majorly focuses on the testing. Testing process is done before the start of writing the code. And system plan is created before starting the development activity. - Incremental Model:
In this model there are multiple developing cycles. These cycles are further divided in many small iterations. Each iteration goes through the phases like requirements, design, implementation and testing. These iterations are easy to manage. During first iteration working version of software is created, thus working software is produced earlier in development process.
