Introduction to System Development Life Cycle (SDLC)
In building an information system, there should be a plan to manage and control the overall project, from the beginning to the end, to achieve the estimated goals and objectives. In order to ease the management of the project, including the analysis, design, and other development activities, we need a guidance or framework that can help in coordinating the work flow of the project. The framework that is needed is the one that identifies all activities required to build, launch, and maintain an information system. The framework also should include the part of analysis, design, programming, testing, and maintaining the system until we can launch and implement the system. The framework is called System Development Life Cycle (SDLC).
Although SDLC requires many various activities or processes, there are several core processes that are required in order to build and develop the project’s output, which is the system. The core processes in developing a new system are as the following:
- Identify the problems or needs and obtain approval to proceed
- Plan and monitor the project about what to do, how, and who does it
- Discover and understand the details of the problems or the needs
- Design the system components to solve the problems
- Build, test, and integrate system components
- Complete system tests and deploy the solution
There are many ways in implementing those core processes in SDLC, in which SDLC helps to build an information system in a progressive process or phases. There are two approaches that we can use to develop SDLC. The first one is the traditional approach, which uses predictive waterfall model of the SDLC. Predictive waterfall model assumes that the processes or phases in SDLC can be completed sequentially with no overlap and done according to the plan. The waterfall model will be shown as the figure below:
Second one is the adaptive approach. Adaptive approach means that we assume the project can change dynamically, so we need to be flexible as the project progressing. In adaptive approach, we can use iterations model. This model provides the six core processes and each of the process will be done by using several iterations. The example can be seen from the figure below:
