The System Development Life Cycle
Table of Contents
Introduction
The System Development Life Cycle (SDLC) is about how software systems are and should be built.
SDLC is, therefore, a mixture of sociology (how software is built in practice in the industry) and professional ethics (how software should be built in an ideal world).
Building software is a complex process, so we use the seven phases idenitifed by the BCS (The UK Chartered Institute for IT) to break this process into small and understandable chunks. See chapter 2.
We will look at two approaches to SDLC: Waterfall (chapter 3) and Agile (chapter 4). We will outline the benfits and deficiencies of these approaches. We will also look at Scrum (chapter 5), a detailed implementation of Agile.
In the remaining chapters, we will focus on some key issues that are integral to building good software. Will look at prototyping (chapter 7), testing (chapter 8), Object Oriented architecture (chapter 9) and maintenance (chapter 10).