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.
