Agile Development
Agile development is a software development approach that breaks the process of developing a large application into smaller parts. Each part, called “iteration”, represents the whole development process and contains planning, design, development, and testing steps. Unlike the Waterfall model, the iterative process adds features one-by-one, providing a working product at the end of each iteration, and increases functionality from cycle to cycle.
What are the benefits of Agile Development?
Since the focus on each iteration is on finding the right solution rather than the complete solution, iterative development ensures that the product is moving in a direction aligned to correct requirements.
Users can provide critical feedback on the entire product rather than just a small sub-system. This helps in improving on the system's design from the very beginning.
Perfect system design is not important at the project's onset since what's not working will anyways be discarded at each iteration.
Planning & Requirement Analysis
Requirement Analysis is the most important and necessary stage in SDLC.
The senior members of the team perform it with inputs from all the stakeholders and domain experts or SMEs in the industry.
Planning for the quality assurance requirements and identifications of the risks associated with the projects is also done at this stage.
Business analyst and Project organizer set up a meeting with the client to gather all the data like what the customer wants to build, who will be the end user, what is the objective of the product. Before creating a product, a core understanding or knowledge of the product is very necessary.
Once the required function is done, an analysis is complete with auditing the feasibility of the growth of a product. In case of any ambiguity, a signal is set up for further discussion.
Once the requirement is understood, the SRS (Software Requirement Specification) document is created. The developers should thoroughly follow this document and also should be reviewed by the customer for future reference.
Defining Requirements
Once the requirement analysis is done, the next stage is to certainly represent and document the software requirements and get them accepted from the project stakeholders.
This is accomplished through "SRS"- Software Requirement Specification document which contains all the product requirements to be constructed and developed during the project life cycle.
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Designing the Software
“How will we get what we want?” This phase of the SDLC starts by turning the software specifications into a design plan called the Design Specification. All stakeholders then review this plan and offer feedback and suggestions. It’s crucial to have a plan for collecting and incorporating stakeholder input into this document.
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Developing the project
In this phase of SDLC, the actual development begins, and the programming is built. The implementation of design begins concerning writing code. Developers have to follow the coding guidelines described by their management and programming tools like compilers, interpreters, debuggers, etc. are used to develop and implement the code.
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Testing
After the code is generated, it is tested against the requirements to make sure that the products are solving the needs addressed and gathered during the requirements stage.
During this stage, unit testing, integration testing, system testing, acceptance testing are done.
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Deployment
Once the software is certified, and no bugs or errors are stated, then it is deployed.
Then based on the assessment, the software may be released as it is or with suggested enhancement in the object segment.
After the software is deployed, then its maintenance begins.
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Maintenance
Once when the client starts using the developed systems, then the real issues come up and requirements to be solved from time to time.
This procedure where the care is taken for the developed product is known as maintenance.