Software Development Process

The software development life cycle is a multistage process that includes requirements specification, analysis, design, implementation, testing, deployment, and maintenance.

Developing a software product is an engineering process. Software products, no matter how large or how small, have the same life cycle: requirements specification, analysis, design, implementation, testing,deployment, and maintenance

Requirements specification

Requirements specification is a formal process that seeks to understand the problem that the software will address and to document in detail what the software system needs to do.

This phase involves close interaction between users and developers. Most of the examples in this book are simple, and their requirements are clearly stated. In the real world, however,

problems are not always well defined. Developers need to work closely with their customers (the individuals or organizations that will

System analysis

System analysis seeks to analyze the data flow and to identify the system’s input and output. When you do analysis, it helps to identify what the output is first, and then figure out what input data you need in order to produce the output.

System design

System design is to design a process for obtaining the output from the input. This phase involves the use of many levels of abstraction to break down the problem into manageable components and design strategies for implementing each component. You can view each component as a subsystem that performs a specific function of the system. The essence of system analysis and design is input, process, and output (IPO).

Implementation

Implementation involves translating the system design into programs. Separate programs are written for each component and then integrated to work together. This phase requires the use of a programming language such as Java. The implementation involves coding, selftesting,and debugging (that is, finding errors, called bugs, in the code).

Testing

Testing ensures that the code meets the requirements specification and weeds out bugs. An independent team of software engineers not involved in the design and implementation of the product usually conducts such testing.

Deployment

Deployment makes the software available for use. Depending on the type of software,it may be installed on each user’s machine or installed on a server accessible on the Internet.

Maintenance

Maintenance is concerned with updating and improving the product. A software product must continue to perform and improve in an ever-evolving environment. This requires periodic upgrades of the product to fix newly discovered bugs and incorporate changes.