Software Development Life Cycle contains five phases:

• Planning
• Analysis
• Design
• Implementation
• Support

Project planning phase

• Define the problem

• Produce the project schedule

• Confirm project feasibility

  • Schedule Feasibility

  • Cost Feasibility

  • Technical Feasibility

  • Operational-Organizational Feasibility

• Staff the project

• Launch the project

Analysis phase

• Gather information

• Define system requirements

• Prioritize requirements

• Prototype for feasibility and discovery

• Generate and evaluate alternatives

• Review recommendations with management

Design phase

• Design and integrate the network

• Design the application architecture

• Design the user interfaces

• Design the system interfaces

• Design and integrate the database

• Prototype for design details

• Design and integrate the system controls

Implementation phase

• General requirements

  • The performance record of the provider

  • Level of technical support from the provider

  • Availability of experienced staff

  • Development cost

  • Expected value of benefits

  • Length of time (schedule) until deployment

  • Impact on internal resources

  • Requirements for internal expertise

  • Organizational impacts (retaining, skill levels)

  • Expected cost of data conversion

  • Warranties and support services (from outside vendors)

• Technical requirements

  • Robustness (the software does not crash)

  • Programming errors (the software calculates correctly)

  • Quality of code (maintainability)

  • Documentation (user and system, on-line and written)

  • Ease of installation

  • Flexibility (the software makes it easy to adjust to new functionality and new environments)

  • Structure (maintanable, easy to understand)

  • User-friendliness (natural and intuitive use)

  • Performance (response time)

  • Scalability (ability to handle large volumes)

  • Compatibility with operating environment (hardware, operating system)

• Functional requirements (Defined in analysis phase.)

Support phase

There is a series of five articles on UML part of Software Development Magazine web site. The first article is here.