Seven Stages of System Development Life Cycle and Six Best Methodologies Explained in a Nutshell

When software development is not your core competence, you need an expert-level dedicated team capable of establishing structured processes and navigating you through a fast-paced technological environment toward a successful launch.

Statistics are unfavorable to projects that lack proper planning, governance, and execution management. According to a joint McKinsey and Oxford Global Projects research, too many organizations overrun budget or timeline by a considerable amount:

One key step to increasing a digital project’s success chances is understanding system development life cycle and building a safe and structured foundation for timely project delivery.  

Let’s intersect the seven stages of the system development life cycle below and analyze the common types of SDLC models and methodologies that project teams apply based on facing constraints.

System Development Life Cycle (SDLC) is a structured process of planning, designing, delivering, and maintaining high-quality digital solutions that satisfy end-users’ needs and goals. 

SDLC enables the development team to divide the entire software development project into tasks that the team can assign, complete, and measure. It simplifies control over different project aspects, helping the team track progress and remain within time/budget limits.

The goals of using system development life cycle are to:

SDLC structures the various project tasks and activities that a development team must plan and complete on a project into seven key phases. These project phases include:

Systems development life cycle specifies which tasks the development team will complete, in what order, and what approaches it will apply to meet end-user expectations and business concerns. 

The type of SDLC usually depends on the project type. Also, phases vary in scope and length. For example, planning and deployment take less time than development or testing; maintenance is usually ongoing. 

Let’s analyze basic SDLC phases in detail:

The first phase of the systems development life cycle (SDLC) is requirements analysis and feasibility. At this stage, the development team focuses on an overall view of digital solutions for business goals. The team analyzes a client’s business specifics, identifies macro challenges, and considers how to address them.

The team receives business requirements for the future system or carves them out in a series of interviews. It determines specific technical requirements and a feature list, breaking down main features into smaller ones.

Team members check if the envisaged solution is possible within the provided budget and timeline. They also analyze risks that can lead to violating the client’s limitations and evaluate cost-effective implementation alternatives. 

For complex solutions, the development team completes a discovery stage as a separate short-term project with its outcomes, such as:

The team can provide a ballpark estimate based on the feature list, while the discovery stage helps increase estimate precision and identify pitfalls that could extend the delivery timeline or lead to scope creep.

The development team turns the requirements analysis and feasibility phase deliverables into an implementation plan, which all team members will use for reference. 

The development team members estimate:

This phase largely identifies the pace of development, testing, implementation, and maintenance phases. The development team identifies the high-level details of the software system, such as:

System architects prepare Design Document Specification, which software engineers use as their primary source while preparing codebase or designing and implementing test cases. 

The biggest task for system architects is designing flexible system architecture that enables efficient scaling in response to growing user needs while evading overengineering. The latter will lead to wasted resources during initial development and maintenance. 

Another important aspect of this phase is UI/UX design. Software designers prepare style guides and branding materials that help create visually appealing solutions. 

They also need to provide developers with instructions on UX implementation that let the entire team focus on user-centric, intuitive flows.

Software development is the longest phase of the system life cycle. In this phase, the team creates software functionality according to prepared requirements and specifications. 

Software developers:

Depending on project size and software type, there are several roles on a project, including front-, back-, mobile, database developers, and so on. They can be united in groups with unified processes on large projects.  

Software development becomes straightforward when the team has outlined structured documentation during the previous stages. Still, continuous planning and documentation updates are possible during this phase to reflect changing business needs.

The testing phase commences when software developers are ready with a part of the system functionality. However, testing, which involves examining software code, is only one of the phases within the Quality Assurance (QA) process. 

QA operates a software testing life cycle, each phase of which corresponds to a phase of the system development life cycle and includes multiple activities:

and more.

As a result, QA engineers and testers have a strategy, test plan, and a set of tools to identify important issues and improvement areas when comparing actual and expected results.

QA and testing team reviews functionality to:

QA engineers apply test automation routine operations (regression, performance, security testing, and more) to decrease the scope of monotonous work, boost delivery, and increase source code coverage with tests.

Software developers transfer source code into the live/production environment during the implementation phase of the systems development life cycle (SDLC) implementation phase. Depending on the selected SDLC methodology, DevOps engineers can assist with deployment.

The team completes an initial system launch or important major updates using a combination of automated and manual deployment. Minor software fixes can be automatically performed several times a day. 

Deployment automation enables the team to provide updates and patches quickly, which can be crucial when the team wants to deliver a bug fix or close a security vulnerability.

Software developers can implement the system through an all-at-once deployment to provide an identical software version to all users — this approach is used for the initial launch.

They can also use approaches such as rolling, blue/green, and canary deployments or traffic splitting to minimize the risks of software outage, ensuring only a limited group of users can be affected by an unsuccessful deployment.

The final phase of the systems development life cycle (SDLC) is operations and maintenance, an ongoing process. Depending on the system size, an operations specialist or an entire team that monitors software health and security 24/7 is required.

Operations specialists add the software to a monitoring system and set up an incident management system to receive instant notifications if the software loses its performance. 

They implement security updates and patches when needed. Also, operations specialists can help detect inefficiencies in resource consumption and optimize waste of cloud/server resources to decrease operation costs and improve scalability.

Development culture that encourages collaboration between development and operations teams is crucial, optimizing software development performance/costs and enabling quick feature deliveries.

SDLC models and methodologies can vary for projects of different sizes and complexity. The software development team selects an SDLC approach depending on goals, available input information, and project limitations.

The team evaluates whether it needs to:

Here are six main SDLC methodologies that a development team can implement to keep in line with your priorities:

Waterfall is a linear approach under which developers work on clearly defined systems development life cycle phases. Each new phase starts after the previous one is complete. Under the waterfall model, scope change is undesired and requires project re-estimation. 

V-model improves the Waterfall approach through constant validation and verification, which increases flexibility, reduces project risks, and improves quality.

The Waterfall/V-model approach best applies to short-term projects with non-ambiguous requirements because changes are not welcome and expensive, especially in later stages. It also works best for industries with high risks and regulations, providing high project control. 

SDLC methodologies included in the Agile umbrella are Scrum, Kanban, Feature-Driven Development, and similar, each helping the team focus on delivering a primary version of a product quickly and for changing/ambiguous requirements.

The project team works in short-term sprints, which include planning, design, testing, coding, and deployment. Deliverables of each sprint are used to collect user feedback and improve the software. 

Unlike the Waterfall/V-model, Agile methodology enables developers to cope with changes in requirements flexibly while switching development direction when users show interest in different functionality.

Lean is part of the Agile methodology; it works best for startups and businesses that want to optimize development costs. It prioritizes identifying value streams and eliminating waste of limited resources.

Similarly to Agile, the team presents working functionality after each sprint, completing all project stages within a cycle. It provides minor but continuous changes to improve product value incrementally. 

The emphasis is on active collaboration and constant process enhancement, which lets the team constantly optimize workflow and free resources. The entire team works as a harmonized unit on a solution for a business problem.

DevOps enhances Agile/Lean methodology by uniting development and operations processes in one workflow. It enables the team to ship features faster than any other approach and efficiently address emerging issues.

DevOps covers all development stages with a constant loop and enables the project team to:

DevOps approach works best for cloud-native software. However, its benefits can be limited in regulated projects and under strict control measures where the use of cloud resources is prohibited.

Rapid application development (RAD) focuses on delivering a new market solution as soon as possible while requiring minimal project resources. 

The development team quickly creates prototypes or working functionality and gives it to end users or stakeholders for immediate testing. They provide constant feedback, which lets developers determine the goals of the next sprint or select priorities from the backlog. 

RAD works best for small to midsize projects with a tight deadline. It may not be as efficient as Agile or Lean for projects with thin budgets that do not allow the development team to increase scope.

The Spiral model combines key elements of Waterfall and RAD approaches to minimize project risks for development teams working on complex software solutions.

Unlike Waterfall, which is linear, the Spiral model is cyclic and focuses on delivering software in parts. The development team formulates a strategy and designs processes based on risk analysis results.

Prototyping is included into development to evaluate risks and clarify ambiguous requirements. 

The Spiral model can be used for complex, regulated projects with incomplete requirements, where several spiral turns may be necessary. 

An important note is that systems development life cycle models can change. The development team can mix elements of several models (e.g., Lean and RAD) when a combination is more beneficial for the client’s project than sticking to one particular model.

By using system development life cycle on a project, the software development team ensures a structured and efficient approach to a client’s needs and a timely project delivery.

Benefits of SDLC include:

SDLC allows businesses to understand the development process, check task statuses, and measure and evaluate project progress.

The development team can identify and prevent common challenges during planning. It also addresses emerging project issues immediately as part of the system life cycle.

A structured system design life cycle lets the team stay within the allocated budget and deliver the most value for the investment.

SDLC enables developers to produce consistent, predictable results that match initial plans and help meet expectations.

Single team members understand project goals, roles, and responsibilities; they can quickly communicate questions with the right person and need no micromanagement.

The team can reallocate resources quickly and switch refocus priorities when business needs change.

By implementing the wrong system development life cycle model or methodology, the development team can face difficult deliveries and excessive use of resources. In extreme cases, it can even throw a software project into disaster.

Lack of consistency between project goals and selected approaches can lead to unproductive time use. Developers can focus on constant improvements, changes, or clarifications and miss deadlines.

The team can overly focus on tasks of low importance or not adapt to constant changes, resulting in inefficient project resource spending.

The testing phase can become poorly adjusted, and either QA engineers will have little time for software testing, or developers will have no time for bug fixes and improvements.

Confusing processes and poorly defined project roles can lead to misunderstanding of project tasks and goals, negatively affecting the quality of provided deliveries.

Using a rigid approach can make the team inflexible and prevent them from responding quickly to changing user needs, which can leave a business behind competitors.

IT Craft is a full-cycle software development company, building a software development life cycle for each client that best fits unique needs and challenges.

As the first step in cooperation, our representatives study project requirements and discuss needs on a call, which can be:

The received information enables our company to assign a dedicated team of specialists with relevant expertise and skills as well as determine which software development methodology enhances the team.

The development team can also introduce changes to the software development cycle when business needs change, e.g., switch from Lean to DevOps after an MVP launch to support scaling and expansion.

MyCarrier is a leading transportation management platform for connecting shippers and carriers directly.

The client envisioned the future platform and required a team that could deliver a solution within the estimated timeline while following stringent quality standards.

IT Craft developers delivered and launched a web portal on time using Agile methodology. The team switched to DevOps to cope with project expansion and turn the client’s system into a cloud-native solution. 

The use of system development life cycle lets the development team organize efficient processes, ensuring the harmonized execution of all project phases: analyze requirements, plan, design, develop, test, deploy, and operate.

Selection of SDLC can greatly affect the success of software development and delivery. Fortunately, several methodologies exist from which the development team can choose the best fit and adapt it to serve your project needs.