Tuesday, March 7, 2017

Describe the phases of the systems development life cycle, and compare the SDLC waterfall model with the spiral model.

Software development life cycle or SDLC for short is a methodology for designing, building, and maintaining information and industrial systems. So far, there exist many SDLC models, such as the Waterfall model, which comprises five phases to be completed sequentially in order to develop a software solution
  • Project planning, feasibility study: Establishes a high-level view of the intended project and determines its goals.
  • Systems analysis, requirements definition: Refines 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.
  • Implementation: 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, the least glamorous and perhaps most important step of all, goes on seemingly forever.
Waterfall Model vs Spiral Model
In spiral model, we can easily adjust the software development with the required changes. The prototypes which are created in every stage, enables us to roll back only a few steps. As soon as any new changes are requested or required we can start up from the last left over prototype version. Whereas, Waterfall model the stages are executed under a sequential flow. Every new phase is processed only after completing the previous phase. This is a big reason why any sudden changes are very hard to accommodate under Waterfall model.
Again, simply because of the sequential nature of the waterfall model if a bug is found or an error is incurred for a preliminary reason, we need to start from the scratch again. Whereas, under spiral model every prototype is tried and tested and hence the chances of find errors at later stages are very rare. For complete list of differences you can check out our Difference category.

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