SDLC Flashcards
What is SDLC?
Software Development Life Cycle is a process used by the software industry to design, develop and test high-quality software. It is also called Software Development Process.
SDLC Phases (6 Phases)
Requirements Gathering and Analysis
Design and Research
Development
Testing and Bug Fixing
Deployment
Maintenance and Updates
Planning
So what are we doing as QA on the current phase?
Feasibility study of the requirement
2. Risk Analysis/Forecasting
3. Bug prevention/mitigation
4. Identifying loopholes
5. Properly express functional requirements and review the gap between features so that they can be analyzed as early as possible.
6. Establish the environmental requirements.
7. Prepare the higher-level test plan including the risk and tools used in the project.
8. Establish a defect tracking methodology.
9. Identify the type of testing to be carried out in the project.
Requirements Gathering and Analysis
This phase marks the beginning of software development. During this phase, all the information and requirements are gathered in order to conceive a concrete expectation of the software product.
Requirements gathering and analysis aims to collect the details of each requirement and establishes an understanding as to why each requirement is present. This discusses the how’s of fulfilling every requirement of the product. Along with these, this step also allows discussions on how each requirement will be tested. Through this, testers can contribute by adding value to the analysis of requirements.
Design and Research
Once the gathering and analysis is complete, the next step is the design. In this phase, the developers and system architects formulate the high-level design of the software and system to achieve each of the determined requirements. By doing so, this phase will determine the technical details of the design such as risks, technologies to be used, project constraints, capability analysis, budget, and time. After these, the whole team will determine the best design approach for the product.
As far as the system architecture goes, the necessary specifications, features, and operations needed to achieve the functional requirements will be detailed in this phase. These include the components that need to be developed, third-party services to be used (if needed), user stories, database structure, and front-end designs and behavior.
- Development
Here is the nitty-gritty part of the SDLC phases. The development starts once all the design requirements are completed. The software design will now be translated into code.
Front-end developers will start to develop the necessary interfaces as well as the GUI to connect with the back-end. The database administrators create the necessary data needed as per the requirements. Developers also work together in creating unit tests for each component and review each other’s codes. They will also create a build to deploy the product to a project-specific environment. These steps can be iterated until all of the requirements are attained.
This phase is also the end of the initial part of the development process before moving on to integration and testing.
Testing and Bug Fixing
After the modules and components are complete, the testing part of the SDLC phases will commence. For this phase, each module will be tested thoroughly depending on the testing strategies developed by the quality assurance (QA) testers to make sure that the software product is completely free of any defects.
A tester’s main role is to contrast the output with the requirements and identify the issues. They make sure that the software product behaves exactly as defined in the requirements. Testers can do this process by following test scripts or test cases for a more structured procedure. They may also do exploratory tests by playing with the features available.
The testing phase would take additional time buffer since this phase needs allocated time for bug fixes and issues that have been found. This cycle—test and fix—will continue until all features are fully functional without any more bugs.
Deployment
Once the software product is tested and freed from any defects or bugs, it should be ready for deployment. Deployment, the fifth of the six SDLC phases, is grooming the product up to be ready for customer use. The User Acceptance Tests should be checked and the software should be live in the production environment.
Maintenance and Updates
As soon as the software product goes live, it marks the beginning of the maintenance phase of the SDLC. This includes the post-production processes such as enhancements and fine-tuning of the system. In this part, the team could also start planning the possible functionalities and features that could be added to the software.
