What is SDLC ?
The SDLC (Software Development Lifecycle) is a process used by developers to build and deliver software applications on time, within budget, and in alignment with customer needs. There are several different types of SDLC model commonly used, including Waterfall, Agile, and DevOps. The SDLC model an organisation chooses will depend highly on its culture and in-house expertise, as well as the specific requirements of the software project.
What is SDLC (Software Development Lifecycle)?
The SDLC (Software Development Lifecycle) is a process used to develop software that meets customer expectations, as well as budget and time constraints.
When building software using the SDLC, organisations usually adopt a specific model, such as Agile, Waterfall, or DevOps. This helps them to structure their software project and deliver it in accordance with best practices. Each SDLC model focuses on different aspects of the development process and can be iterative or non-iterative. The model a team chooses will depend on their capabilities, organisational culture, and project requirements.
SDLC models have several phases, including planning, design, testing, and deployment. Each phase provides a clear structure for developing software, helping teams to initiate the project, build the software, launch it, and maintain it afterwards. As many SDLC models are agile in nature, SDLC phases are often iterative and cycle back to earlier phases if required.
Why is the SDLC important?
The SDLC is important because it ensures software is built using best practices. It offers a solid structure and methodology to follow when developing software, helping teams to deliver their software projects on time and within budget.
Here are some other reasons why SDLC is important:
- Quality assurance: With multiple stages of testing and validation, the SDLC ensures quality assurance, helping to identify and fix issues early in the development process. This focus on quality assurance ensures that teams can deliver high-quality software that meets customer expectations.
- Risk management: The SDLC includes multiple risk assessment and mitigation measures, helping teams to address potential risks early in the process. This minimises the impact that risks can have on project timelines, budgets, and outcomes.
- Effective resource management: With its robust framework, the SDLC helps to optimise the allocation of resources, such as budget, time, and personnel. This organised approach helps teams to deliver on time and within budget.
- Effective communication: The SDLC promotes clear communication between all the stakeholders involved in the software project, such as developers, customers, and project managers. With roles, responsibilities and communication channels clearly established, the SDLC ensures that all stakeholders can collaborate and align throughout the entire development process.
- Customer satisfaction: The entire aim of the SDLC is to deliver software that meets customer expectations. By involving customers in the requirements gathering, design and testing phases, teams using the SDLC can ensure that the final product delivers value.
- Scalability: During the design and development phases, developers must build software that considers scalability and maintainability. The SDLC therefore helps to ensure that software can accommodate future growth.
- Compliance: If the software is being built for a regulated industry, SDLC offers a solid framework for ensuring compliance with industry regulations. This is because teams are required to document processes, maintain audit trails, and implement appropriate controls.
The phases of SDLC
The SDLC consists of several phases:
1. Planning:
This phase defines the project requirements, goals, timelines, and resources. Developers can conduct risk assessments and feasibility studies to assess whether the project faces any challenges, before creating a formal project plan.
2. Analysis:
In this phase, stakeholder requirements are gathered, analysed, and documented. This enables developers to understand the needs of end-users and potential technical constraints.
3. Design:
During this phase, developers can start to design and develop the architecture based on the requirements gathered. This usually involves creating high-level designs, detailed designs, and prototypes to validate design decisions.
4. Implementation:
Also known as the coding or development phase, this is when the code is written based on the design specifications. Developers write the code using best practices to ensure the software is scalable, secure, manageable and maintainable.
5. Testing:
In this stage, the software is tested to ensure that it meets requirements and functions correctly. There are multiple software testing methods, including unit testing, integration testing, system testing, and acceptance testing.
6. Deployment:
Once the software has been tested and approved, it is deployed to production environments. This usually involves a series of technical tasks, such as installation, data migration, and configuration.
7. Maintenance:
After the software is deployed, it enters the maintenance phase, where it is monitored and modified if needed. This enables developers to correct issues with the software, such as bugs and vulnerabilities, or adapt it by introducing new features.
How does SDLC address security?
The SDLC plays a major role in ensuring software security. To minimise security risks and ensure data protection, each phase of the SDLC must take security into consideration.
Here’s how SDLC addresses security:
Requirement analysis:
During the requirement analysis phase, developers can identify security requirements for the software and use this insight to integrate security measures into the design. This involves assessing the software for vulnerabilities and risks, and understanding the potential threats it could face.
Secure deployment:
Once tested, the software needs to be deployed securely in production environments. Developers can apply patches and updates, implement secure configurations, and secure the access controls to prevent unauthorised access.
Design phase:
In this phase, security measures are incorporated into the software design. Such measures might include data protection, encryption, secure authentication, access controls and network security.
Security awareness and training:
For all stakeholders involved in the software project, training is essential to ensure that they understand security threats and the procedures for handling security incidents.
Secure coding practices:
When coding the software, developers use best practice techniques to ensure it is resistant to vulnerabilities such as cross-site scripting, injection attacks, and insecure direct object references (IDOR).
Security monitoring and maintenance:
The SDLC requires ongoing security monitoring and maintenance. This includes measures such as monitoring system logs, analysing security events, and applying security patches and updates. Conducting regular security assessments and audits helps ensure that the software remains secure in the future.
Security testing:
During the testing phase, developers can leverage security testing techniques such as penetration testing, security code reviews, and vulnerability scanning to identify security vulnerabilities in the written code.
What are the SDLC methodologies?
There are multiple SDLC models that organisations can use to manage their software development projects. Such models are usually iterative and flexible, allowing for continuous improvement and refinement to ensure that the finished product is of high-quality and meets customer expectations.
The SDLC methodology an organisation chooses will depend on the size of their software project, complexity, deadline, and customer requirements, and many organisations will combine or adapt methods to meet their specific project needs or organisational culture.
Here are some of the most common SDLC methodologies:
Waterfall Model
The Waterfall development model progresses through a sequence of phases. Each phase must be completed before moving onto the next, and the phases include requirements analysis, design, implementation, testing, deployment, and maintenance.
Agile Development
Agile models - such as Scrum, Kanban and Extreme Programming (XP) - are highly iterative and flexible software development methods. Agile teams collaborate closely together and work in short cycles called sprints to deliver incremental releases of software. Using this approach, stakeholders can provide feedback, enabling the agile team to implement changes and improve the software, leading to a quality final product.
DevOps
The DevOps methodology is much more than a process to follow - it is also a philosophy emphasising close collaboration between development and operations teams. With DevOps, software development is usually automated and deployment pipelines are streamlined, allowing for faster and more efficient software delivery.
Spiral Model
The Spiral methodology blends elements of Waterfall and iterative models. It works on iterative development cycles designed to incorporate feedback and improvements based on risk analysis. This model is well-suited to software projects with high levels of risk and uncertainty.
Lean Software Development
Lean methods are designed to deliver a quality product, whilst minimising waste and maximising efficiency. Principles of lean software development include delivering early and often, continuously improving processes, and empowering teams.
Rapid Application Development (RAD)
The RAD method focuses on prototyping and iterative development and aims to accelerate the delivery of software. Using RAD, developers and end users collaborate to quickly iterate prototypes and deliver a quality final product.
SDLC Tools and Technologies
There are multiple tools available to support the SDLC. Such tools help teams to manage different stages and elements of the software development process. What a team chooses to adopt will depend on the requirements of its projects, team preferences, and budget constraints.
Here are some examples of SDLC tools:
Project Management Tools
Project management tools help a team to plan, manage and track its projects. Examples include Trello, Jira, Asana, and Monday.com. For effective communication, teams will also require collaboration and documentation tools, such as Slack, Zoom, Confluence, and Microsoft Word.
Software and Application Development Tools
When building software, teams can leverage a range of tools to help them manage requirements, versions, testing, deployments, bug tracking, and reviews. Examples include IBM Rational Doors for requirement management; Git for version control; Visual Studio for development environments; Jenkins for continuous integration and deployment; Selenium and Crucible for testing and reviewing; and Bugzilla for bug tracking and issue management.
How OVHcloud Supports SDLC
Managed Kubernetes Service
Kubernetes® is one of the most widely-used container orchestration tools on the market. It is used by companies of all sizes. It can be used to deploy applications, scale them up and make them more resilient - even in hybrid or multi-cloud infrastructures.
Service Managed Kubernetes® is powered by OVHcloud Public Cloud instances. With OVHcloud Load Balancers and additional disks integrated into it, you can host any kind of work load on it with total reversibility.
General Purpose
A wide range of instances suited to all of your needs
Our General Purpose instances have balanced and guaranteed resources (CPU, memory, storage and network), providing your General Purpose instances with high performance computing to efficiently manage the bulk of production workloads.
You can also get improved processor performance while reducing your costs, thanks to our competitive and transparent pricing.