Concept Of Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC)

Concept Of Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC)
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Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) is a set of several phases as under. Once the software phases through all these phases over a period of time, it becomes necessary to restart the software development afresh. That is why it is called a cycle.

1) Feasibility Study
In this curtain raiser phase, the developer tries to visualize all the subsequent phases and then tries to answer the question, "Is it feasible?" This crucial phase has a decisive bearing on the project initiation and hence the developer aims at a sort of skimming through all the future phases to figure out probable handicaps & hindrances. Unless there are promising solutions to these anticipated hiccups and the complete, smooth activity, no green signal is given to the project. This critical phase has many areas that are important:

a) Technical Feasibility
This ascertains whether the tasks to be delegated to the computer could be successfully articulated with software and whether the project is possible with the technology available currently in terms of hardware, communication links, software platforms/languages.

b) Economic Feasibility
This concentrates on the financial aspects of cost benefits and tries to ensure that the start-up cost and recurring expensive are justifiable. In many cases, the benefits are hard to quantify as they represent intangible gains like customer service, reduced time to market, etc. The importance of a nod or green signal from the finance angle hardly needs to be underlined.

c) Operational Feasibility
This looks into the probability of smooth working of the software when people put into the action. It is explored with the help of factors like ease software offers to those who operate it, fitting the work flow of steps to be taken by the man and the machine.

d) Social Feasibility
This examines the broader issues relating to the people at large who, though not directly operating the software, from the significant class of end user. They interface with the system in an indirect manner, yet are impacted by the inputs, outputs and the response time of the system.