Systems Development Life-cycle - Systems Development Phases

Systems Development Phases

The System Development Life Cycle framework provides a sequence of activities for system designers and developers to follow. It consists of a set of steps or phases in which each phase of the SDLC uses the results of the previous one.

A Systems Development Life Cycle (SDLC) adheres to important phases that are essential for developers, such as planning, analysis, design, and implementation, and are explained in the section below. A number of system development life cycle (SDLC) models have been created: waterfall, fountain, spiral, build and fix, rapid prototyping, incremental, and synchronize and stabilize. The oldest of these, and the best known, is the waterfall model: a sequence of stages in which the output of each stage becomes the input for the next. These stages can be characterized and divided up in different ways, including the following:

  • Preliminary Analysis: The objective of phase 1 is to conduct a preliminary analysis, propose alternative solutions, describe costs and benefits and submit a preliminary plan with recommendations.
Conduct the preliminary analysis: in this step, you need to find out the organization's objectives and the nature and scope of the problem under study. Even if a problem refers only to a small segment of the organization itself then you need to find out what the objectives of the organization itself are. Then you need to see how the problem being studied fits in with them.
Propose alternative solutions: In digging into the organization's objectives and specific problems, you may have already covered some solutions. Alternate proposals may come from interviewing employees, clients, suppliers, and/or consultants. You can also study what competitors are doing. With this data, you will have three choices: leave the system as is, improve it, or develop a new system.
Describe the costs and benefits.
  • Systems analysis, requirements definition: Defines project goals into defined functions and operation of the intended application. Analyzes end-user information needs.
  • Systems design: Describes desired features and operations in detail, including screen layouts, business rules, process diagrams, pseudocode and other documentation.
  • Development: The real code is written here.
  • Integration and testing: Brings all the pieces together into a special testing environment, then checks for errors, bugs and interoperability.
  • Acceptance, installation, deployment: The final stage of initial development, where the software is put into production and runs actual business.
  • Maintenance: What happens during the rest of the software's life: changes, correction, additions, moves to a different computing platform and more. This is often the longest of the stages.

In the following example (see picture) these stage of the systems development life cycle are divided in ten steps from definition to creation and modification of IT work products:

Not every project will require that the phases be sequentially executed. However, the phases are interdependent. Depending upon the size and complexity of the project, phases may be combined or may overlap.

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