The Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) is all about promptly producing high-quality software. To achieve this objective, your software team should follow the SDLC steps rigorously. But what exactly is the SDLC, and what are its phases? Read on to know more.
What is the SDLC?
If you are a software developer or work in a software development team, certain software development principles follow. However, you must follow the SDLC rigorously. But what exactly is the SDLC?
The SDLC refers to the work phases involved in being able to produce software applications. Each phase in itself corresponds to a particular role or responsibility that programmers need to understand, successfully manage, and optimize to deliver quality software services quickly. The phases in the SDLC are:
a) Requirements Gathering
b) Software Design
c) Software Development
d) Testing and Integration
e) Deployment
and
f) Operationalization and Maintenance
Let’s look at these phases in more detail.
a) Requirements Gathering
During the requirements gathering phase, the software team is responsible for identifying, gathering, and defining current requests, problems, and requirements related to the software. Some activities in this phase are creating specific software specifications, creating a detailed plan, issue tracking, documentation, and product or project planning, which also involves the allocation of resources to the project. Defining software requirements gives the team the context and foresight needed to produce and deliver the software successfully.
b) Software Design
In this phase, the software team makes design decisions about the make and architecture of the software solution. Some of the activities in this phase are the creation of design documents and coding guidelines. This phase also includes discussing the practices, tools, frameworks, or runtimes to help the software team meet the goals defined in the previous phase.
c) Software Development
During this phase, the software team builds the software depending upon the design decisions that were made. Here the team is responsible for meeting the outcomes and goals that were set during the software requirements gathering phase. They do this by implementing the solution.
The software development process involves teams, unexpected challenges, and new technologies. However, development teams usually work with project or product managers and teach leads to help make decisions, provide support, and streamline the process. This phase ends as soon as the software team has developed the code.
d) Testing and Integration
During this phase, the software implementation created in the previous phase is tested comprehensively for quality assurance purposes. Testing the solution is necessary to ensure that the project passes quality and performance standards. This phase may involve unit testing, integration testing, end-to-end testing, verification, validation, and identifying/reporting bugs (if any) in the software.
e) Deployment
During the deployment phase, the software solution is deployed into an appropriate production environment. The project that has earlier been designed, developed, and comprehensively tested is shared with the end-users of the software. This phase may involve providing infrastructure in either an on-premise or cloud environment and defining a deployment strategy to deliver any software changes to the customer.
f) Operationalization and Maintenance
During this phase, the software is put into operation and monitored to determine whether there are any issues or incidents post-deployment of the software. This phase may involve reviewing the software, monitoring network settings, configurations of the infrastructure, and evaluation of application services performance in the production environment.
This phase may involve management or incident resolution during any changes made or issues that develop that may impact the user base. During this phase, you must be aware of the differences between observability vs monitoring. In short, monitoring is to notify you if something goes wrong in the software application. In comparison, observability helps you understand why this happened.
