Consider our school, how do we know that the life cycle was developed in our university and how do we know it meets our needs?
As a part of the university and as an IT student it is my privilege to know the development of the university, how it goes and how it works. System development is indeed contributing a big impact to any institution; but does the university apply this process to improve every form of transactions in the school? Does it meet the needs of every student, faculty and staff of the university? These are some of the questions that need an answer to be able to define a proper “development”. Let me first define what this life cycle means.
When I searched in the internet about the “life cycle”, I found different meanings in varied fields. Some in business meaning, from enterprise form to biological approach and there’s also from software life cycle to System Development Life Cycle also known as SDLC. With these various terms, I consider SDLC as a life cycle.
The system development life cycle is the process of developing information systems through investigation, analysis, design, implementation and maintenance. System development life cycle is a systems approach to problem solving and is made up of several phases, each comprised of multiple steps.
The major steps system development life cycle include the following steps.
Planning
It is the most important task in creating software products in making the planning steps they have to identify the scope and boundary of the problem, and plan the development strategy and goals.
Analysis
Study and analyze the problems, causes, and effects. Then, identify and analyze the requirements that must be fulfilled by any successful solutions.
Design
During the design phase the System Analyst will document the inputs, processing and outputs of each program within the application.
Implementation
Throughout the implementation phase programmers would be assigned to write the specific programs using a programming language decided by the system analyst. Once the system of programs is tested the new application is installed for people to use. As time goes by, things change and a specific part or program might need repair
Maintenance
In this phase, it goes through a mini planning, analysis, design and implementation. The programs that need modification are identified and programmers change or repair those programs. After several years of use, the system usually becomes obsolete. At this point a major revision of the application is done.
Now, how do we know if the cycle meets the needs of the university?
We would know that the chosen SDLC will meet the needs of the university if the understanding of its processes and the process itself gave way to easier and less time consuming software development with regards to the situation of the university. For example, we all know that the university is run by the government so we can assume that the budget will always be limited. Considering this fact, if our chosen SDLC will truly meet our needs then it must give processes that will less likely to rely on outsourcing.
