Many software organizations use software development life cycle in their projects as it possess detailed strategies regarding developing, maintaining, replacing and altering or enhancing specific software.
This process is used by software industries in order to design, develop as well as test the quality of software’s. The main focus of software development life cycle is to meet or exceed the customer’s satisfactions and expectations as well as reach to completion within specific time limits and cots related estimates.
It is also called as software development process which is a framework defining tasks and performed at each steps in the software development process.
Phases of Software Development Life Cycle:
- Requirement Accumulation and analysis: In this phase, the requirements related to business are gathered in this phase. Many project managers and stake holders are focused on this phase.
For the purpose of determining the requirements such as the user of the system, pattern of used system, type of data which should be used into systems, data of output by the system etc, no of meetings with mangers, stake holders and users are being held. These kinds of general questions have been answered in the requirement gathering phase.
- Design: With the help of requirement specifications, the system and software design is prepared in this phase which has been studied in the first phase. It is very helpful in identifying the process of hardware as well as requirements of the system and defines overall system architecture. It serves as input for the next phase of the model.
- Implementation: The work is divided in this phase into modules or unites by receiving system designing documents and after that the work of coding is started. The main focus of this phase for developer as code is produced in it and this is the longest phase of software development life cycle.
- Testing: In order to make sure that whether the product is actually solving the needs addressed and gathered during the requirements phase or not, the code is tested against the requirements after the development of the code. This phase includes unit testing, integration testing, system testing and acceptance testing.
- Maintenance: After the use of the developed system by the customers, actual difficulties occurs which needs to be resolved from time to time. In this process, the main focus is on taking care and that’s why this process is called maintenance.