Explain the five stages of the systems development life cycle

Answer 1

The first step in the SDLC is to develop a systems strategy, which requires an understanding the strategic business needs of the organization. This may be derived from the organization's mission statement, an analysis of competitive pressures on the firm, and the nature of current and anticipated market conditions. These needs reflect the organizations current position relative to where it needs to be long term to maintain strategic advantage.

Project initiation is the process by which systems proposals are assessed for consistency with the strategic systems plan and evaluated in terms of their feasibility and cost-benefit characteristics. Alternative conceptual designs are considered and those selected enter the construct phase of the SDLC.

As mentioned earlier, some organizations have such unique information needs that they can only be adequately met through internal development. The in-house development step includes analyzing user needs, designing processes and databases, creating user views, programming the applications, and testing and implementing the completed system.

When the nature of the project and the needs of the user permit, most organizations will seek a pre-coded commercial software package rather than develop a new system from scratch.

Maintenance and support involves both acquiring and implementing the latest software versions of commercial packages and making in-house modifications to existing systems to accommodate changing user needs. Maintenance may be relatively trivial, such as modifying an application to produce a new report or more extensive, such as programming new functionality into a system. Another aspect of maintenance includes a establishing a user support infrastructure. This could include help desk services, providing user training and education classes, and documenting user feedback pertaining to problems and system errors.