Software Development Life Cycle Summary

Software Development Life Cycle process

The standard process for software development consists of six phases, while the six phases require a wide variety of documents to be prepared, which documents need to be prepared at each stage, and the main contents of these documents are as follows:

1. Feasibility and Planning research phase

Feasibility Study report: In the feasibility study and planning phase, to determine the development objectives and overall requirements of the software, to carry out feasibility analysis, investment income analysis, development planning, and complete the documentation should be prepared.

Project Development Plan: The purpose of preparing the project development plan is to document, in the form of documents, to the personnel responsible for the work in the development process, development progress, the requirements of the budget, the requirements of the software and hardware requirements of the arrangements to be documented, in order to carry out and check the project in accordance with the plan to open work.

2. Requirements Analysis Phase

Software Requirement Specification: The software Requirement specification is compiled in order to enable both users and software developers to have a common understanding of the software's initial provisions , so that it becomes the basis of the whole development work. The content includes the provisions of the function of the performance of the regulations.

Data Requirement Specification: The data Requirement specification is designed to provide technical information about the description and data acquisition requirements of the processed data throughout the development period.

Preliminary User manual: The user manual is designed to use non-specialized terminology of the language, fully describe the software system has the functions and basic use of methods. The user (or potential users) can use this manual to understand the purpose of the software and to determine under what circumstances and how to use it.

3. Design Phase

Summary Design Manual: The summary design specification can also be called the System Design Manual, the system referred to here refers to the program system. The purpose of the preparation is to explain the design considerations of the program system, including the basic process of the program system, the organization structure of the program system, the module division, the function assignment and the interface design. operational design, data structure design and error-handling design provide the basis for detailed design of the program.

Detailed design Instructions: Detailed design instructions can also be called programming instructions. The purpose of the preparation is to illustrate the design of each program (each module or subroutine) in each level of a software system, if a software system is relatively simple and has few levels, this document may not be written separately, The content is incorporated into the summary design manual.

Database Design Manual: The purpose of the database design manual is to design a database of all the identification, logical structure and physical structure to make specific design provisions.

First draft of the test plan: The tests described here refer mainly to assembly tests and validation tests of the entire program system. This document is prepared to provide a test plan for the software, including the content of each test activity, schedule, design considerations, test data collation methods and evaluation criteria.

4. implementation Phase

Module Development Dossier (started): module development files are developed in the process of module development, each completed a module or a set of closely related modules to write a review, should be all the module development files together. The purpose of writing is to document and summarize the progress and results of low-level development so as to facilitate the management and review of the entire module development process and to provide very useful technical information for future maintenance.

User manual completed

Operating manual: The operating manual is prepared to provide the operator with the specific process and knowledge of each run of the software, including details of the operating methods.

Final version of the test plan:

5. Test Phase

Module Development Dossier ( must be completed in this phase )

Test Analysis Report: The test Analysis report was written to document the results, findings and analysis of the assembly test and validation test.

Project Development Summary Report: the preparation of the project development Summary report is to summarize the experience of the project development work, explain the actual development results and evaluation of all aspects of the development work.

6. operation and Maintenance phase

The preparation of the monthly Development Report is aimed at timely reporting the progress and situation of project development to the relevant management, so as to identify and deal with the problems in the development process in time. In general, the development progress report is prepared monthly in the project team. If the software system developed is large, the whole project is divided into several sub-project teams, and the monthly Development progress report will be prepared by the Sub-project team monthly.

In the case of a software, some documents may be written in a number of phases.

In view of the creative mental work of software development, and given the enormous differences in size and complexity of different software, this guide believes that there should be some flexibility in the documentation process, and that not every type of document must be prepared.

Measuring factors for document preparation

In the case of a low sum of factors , the content of the Project development Summary Report should include: the main function of the program, the basic process, test results and instructions for use.           

The test analysis report should be written, but not very formal.

Data requirements and database design instructions need to be written based on the actual needs of the software being developed.

Example 2: In order to avoid the lack or excessive documentation in software development, a simple way is to make the software file preparation requirements and the size of the software to link together, this is the starting point of this example. The size of the software may be divided into four levels:

1. Small-scale software source program less than 5 lines of software;

2. The number of software source programs in the scale of the software to ten ;

3. Large-scale software source program line number of 000?500 software;

4. Special large-scale software source program more than the number of software.

The documentation requirements for the above level four software are set out in table O3, respectively.  

As for the number of source programs 5~ Ten, the software, Its documentation requirements are between two levels, depending on the specific circumstances of a software product, the project leader , in accordance with the provisions of table O3 , determine the types of documents that need to be prepared.

For Large-scale software with more than a few lines of source, you can further expand the 14 types of documents specified in this guide into more categories as needed.

Software Development Life Cycle Summary