The software development life cycle (SDLC) defines tasks that are performed at each stage in the software development process. The SDLC is a structure followed by a development team within a software company.
The SDLC consists of the following activities:
- Planning: The most important stages of software development—requirement gathering or requirement analysis—are usually completed by the most skilled and experienced software engineers in the organization. Once all the requirements have been gathered from the stakeholders, the next step is to determine the scope of the project and create a scope document.
- Implementation: The software engineers start coding according to the client’s requirements.
- Testing: This step helps reveal defects or bugs in the created software.
- Documentation: Every project has its own documentation for every step and future reference. This helps a lot with improvements in the development process. The design documentation may include the described interface in a written form (API).
- Deployment: After it is approved, the software is released.
- Maintaining: Software maintenance is done for future reference. Software upgrades or changes can take longer than the creation of the initial software variant.