Software Development Life Cycle |
In real life, every stage of your development cycle has its own challenges. At the requirements gathering phase, developers and analysts usually discover that their application is to be used by multiple groups, usually in the form of different departments or divisions. These groups may or may not have conflicting interests. They may all want the same thing, but use different procedures or approaches to get it. Some would want to get two different pictures out of the same information. The developers/analysts' responsibility at this stage is figuring out the best ways to gather, store, interpret and present the information to different groups. Sometimes, getting the user groups to agree on a certain approach could prove to be a big obstacle with the potential to ignite a workplace conflict. From all the ideas of different user groups, developers and analysts have to figure out which ideas are feasible, which are conflicting, which ideas are complimentary to others and so forth. From all these, they again have to figure out how to best implement what the users want, present their analysis and findings to user groups for acceptance. This is the most critical and fragile phase of the development process. You can not afford to take short-cuts here without risking rejection of the software by its intended users. Once they have all agreed on the requirement specifications, the development process progresses to the next phase, which is coding and testing. During this phase a person or group leading the development picks the best team for the job, this team have to include programmers who have to write the instructions telling the computer what to do, Project manager(s) tasked with making sure that the project does not fall behind schedule, and that the finished components are up to standard and inline with what the users wanted. In addition to this, the team would also require a dedicated resource from the business unit who has expert level knowledge of the business process. Such an individual should also be able to make decisions on what route to take when the development process hit "the wall". The team should also have somebody to test both the functionality and best development practices of the developers' code. Testing will have to occur frequently during the development phase to make sure that errors are fixed earlier in the development process. Once the development phase is finished, a group of ordinary users should then be brought in to test the application. They test for accuracy in how the functions are performed, ease of use, and so forth. Analysts/developers are required to closely track what the users are saying, things they need fixed, things they like the most and so on. One all errors discovered during this testing are fixed, the application is ready for acceptance testing. In many case this test serves as acceptance testing, in which case you can move from this phase to end user training and then put your software in production mode. At this time, development seizes and all modifications are part of what is called software maintenance. |
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