Software Development Life Cycle, also known as SDLC holds a very strong position in the software development process. The SDLC helps one to determine or come up with an approximate time that will be required to develop a software. Also, it helps in determining the various phases through which a software undergoes throughout its life or while it is being developed. Software Development Life Cycle has various stages or phases, each of which has a specific task and definition. Each process is a successor of the previous one, i.e., the phases should be executed in a specific manner.
Following are the different stages of SDLC:
- Requirement gathering & Analysis: The requirements from the customer are gathered. Various questions like who is going to be the user of the product? What does the software do? What type of data is to be stored? Etc. helps in gathering the information from the customers. Once the requirement is gathered properly, it is then analysed and feasibility is checked to make sure if it a good idea to move forward with.
- Design: In this phase, the overall design of the product, i.e., the software and the system is prepared based on the study of the requirement gathered in the previous phase.
- Implementation/ Coding: The software is then coded according to the design made.
- Testing: The developed product is then tested for the desired result and output. Various test cases are applied on the software so developed to check if it gives the desired output in every test case.
- Deployment: Once the product undergoes the testing phase, it is deployed, i.e., delivered to the customer along with all the necessary documents such as user manual. This phase also consists of beta testing part. Beta testing is done by the users of the product.
- Maintenance: Once the software is deployed to the customer, the tech team along with the after sales team takes care of the software and any complaints from the user of the software.