Week Six Checkpoint – Systems Development Life Cycle
Richard Adams
XBIS/219
June 10, 2011
Dr. Shawn Rieder

Week Six Checkpoint – Systems Development Life Cycle
The Systems Development Life Cycle (SDLC) is a traditional systems development method that many organizations use for large-scale IT Projects (Rainer & Turban, 2009). The SDLC has a defined structure made up of sequential processes consisting of well-defined tasks. The stages outlined in sequential order that make up the SDLC process are systems investigation, systems analysis, systems design, programming, testing, implementation, operation, and maintenance. Other models exist with the same flow similar to the SDLC structure, but contain either fewer or more steps.
Systems investigation is the first stage of the SDLC process with the main task consisting of the feasibility study. According to Rainer and Turban (2009), the feasibility study allows an organization to decide if it should continue using an existing system unchanged, modify or enhance the existing system, or develop a new system. A good example of a system that an organization would conduct a feasibility study on would be an existing Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system (Batada & Rahman, 2011). Once complete, an organization must make a “Go-No-Go” decision and proceed from there.
Systems design and systems analysis are the next sequential steps in the SDLC process (Rainer & Turban, 2009). The systems analysis stage defines the business problem in greater detail, identifies its causes, specifies the solution, and identifies the information requirements that the solution will satisfy. System design describes how the system will accomplish this task encompassing two significant aspects of the new system: logical system design that states what the system will do and physical system design that states how