Systems development life cycle

Systems development life cycle

The SDLC phases serve as a programmatic guide to project activity and provide a flexible but consistent way to conduct projects to a depth matching the scope of the project. Each of the SDLC phase objectives are described in this section with key deliverables, a description of recommended tasks, and a summary of related control objectives for effective management. It is critical for the project manager to establish and monitor control objectives during each SDLC phase while executing projects. Control objectives help to provide a clear statement of the desired result or purpose and should be used throughout the entire SDLC process. Control objectives can be grouped into major categories (domains), and relate to the SDLC phases as shown in the figure.^[9]

To manage and control any SDLC initiative, each project will be required to establish some degree of a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) to capture and schedule the work necessary to complete the project. The WBS and all programmatic material should be kept in the “project description” section of the project notebook. The WBS format is mostly left to the project manager to establish in a way that best describes the project work. There are some key areas that must be defined in the WBS as part of the SDLC policy. The following diagram describes three key areas that will be addressed in the WBS in a manner established by the project manager.

Baselines in the SDLC

Baselines are an important part of the systems development life cycle (SDLC). These baselines are established after four of the five phases of the SDLC and are critical to the iterative nature of the model .^[10] Each baseline is considered as a milestone in the SDLC.

• functional baseline: established after the conceptual design phase.
• allocated baseline: established after the preliminary design phase.
• product baseline: established after the detail design and development phase.
• updated product baseline: established after the production construction phase.
  
  

Complementary to SDLC

Complementary software development methods to systems development life cycle (SDLC) are:

• Software prototyping
• Joint applications development (JAD)
• Rapid application development (RAD)
• Extreme programming (XP); extension of earlier work in Prototyping and RAD.
• Open-source development
• End-user development
• Object-oriented programming