What is the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC)?
July 9, 2013 justin in insight
The Software Development Life Cycle is a process that ensures good software is built. Each phase in the life cycle has its own process and deliverables that feed into the next phase. There are typically 5 phases starting with the analysis and requirements gathering and ending with the implementation. Let’s look in greater detail at each phase:

Requirements Gathering/Analysis
This phase is critical to the success of the project. Expectations (whether of a client or your team) need to be fleshed out in great detail and documented. This is an iterative process with much communication taking place between stakeholders, end users and the project team. The following techniques can be used to gather requirements: * Identify and capture stakeholder requirements using customer interviews and surveys. * Build multiple use cases to describe each action that a user will take in the new system. * Prototypes can be built to show the client what the end product will look like. Tools like Omnigraffle, HotGloo and Balsalmiq are great for this part of the process.
In a corporate setting, this means taking a look at your customers, figuring out what they want, and then designing what a successful outcome would look like in a new bit of software.
Design
Technical design requirements are prepared in this phase by lead development staff that can include architects and lead developers. The Business Requirements are used to define how the application will be written. Technical requirements will detail database tables to be added, new transactions to be defined, security processes and hardware and system requirements.
Let’s look in more detail at some of the activities involved in this stage:
Risk analysis * Threats and vulnerabilities which may arise from interactions