SYSTEMS DEVELOPMENT LIFE

CYCLE
SDLC
• Is the overall process for developing information
systems from planning and analysis through
implementation and maintenance
• SDLC is comprised of seven distinct phases:
planning, analysis, design, development, testing,
implementation and maintenance.
1. Phase 1: Planning
• Activities
a. Identify and select the system for
development:
b. Assess project feasibility
c. Develop the project plan
Identify and select the system for
development
• Consider employees information systems’
proposals as they experience difficulties
in executing their jobs.
• Usually employees proposals may be too
expensive to meet. In this case they
consider the critical success areas/factors
to help which system to build.
• Critical success factor is a factor that is
critical to an org’n success e.g. to
determine which system to develop, an
org’n tracks all the proposed systems and
prioritizes them by business impact or
critical success factors. This allows the
business to prioritize problems that
require immediate attention and which
problems can wait.
Assess Project Feasibility
• Is an assessment to determine whether
the new proposed system is achievable
given the org’n resources and constraints
in regard to technology, economics,
organizational factors , and legal and
ethical considerations
Types of Feasibility Studies
• Economic Feasibility Study
• Technical Feasibility
• Organizational Feasibility
• Social Feasibility/legal and contractual
feasibility
• Operational Feasibility
Economic Feasibility
• Often called a cost benefit analysis
• Identifies the financial benefits and costs
associated with the systems development
project.
• Project appraisal techniques may be used e.g.
payback, IRR, NVP or ARR to ascertain the
viability of the project.
• Tangible benefits e.g. Cost cuttings/reduction
of costs
• Intangible benefits e.g. goodwill, motivation,
retention of competent staff etc
Technical Feasibility
• This is an assessment of the org’n
capability to provide the necessary
technical requirement to support the
system (available or afford to purchase)
viz:
▫ Hardware and software
▫ Network infrastructure
▫ Technical skills available or through
training
Operational (schedule) Feasibility
• Assesses the likelihood that all the
potential time frames and completion
dates will be met.
• The assessment will involve determining
the impact of the system implementation
on the normal operation of the
organization in the course of
implementation period.
Social/legal and contractual Feasibility
• Includes determining how the
implementation of the new system will
affect the human rights, welfare, health
etc
• Also examines all potential legal and
contractual ramifications of the proposed
system i.e. will the implementation of the
proposed system make the organization
breach some contractual agreements or
against the law?
Develop a project plan
• Is one of the most challenging and most
important activities.
• It logs and tracks every single activity
performed during the project . If an
activity is missed or takes longer than
expected to complete, the project plan
must be updated to reflect these changes
Phase 2: Analysis
• Involves analyzing end user business
requirements and refining the project
goals into defined functions and
operations of the intended system .
Activities involved:
a) Gather business requirements
b) Create process diagrams
c) Perform a buy versus build analysis
a) Gather business
requirements
• These are the detailed set of business requests that the
system must meet to be successful.
• The focus is gathering the true business requirements
for the system e.g. a sample business requirement
might state: “track all customer sales by product,
region and sales representative” this requirement
states what the system must do from the business
perspective giving no details or information on how the
system is going to meet this requirement.
• Requirement mangt is the process of identifying,
documenting, communicating, tracking, and managing
project requirements as well as changes to those
requirements
Methods of gathering business
requirements
1. Perform a joint application dvpt (JAD) sessions
where employees meet, sometimes for several days,
to define or review the business reqmts for the
system.
2. Interview individuals to determine current
operations and current issues
3. Compile questionnaires to survey employees to
discover issues
4. Make observations to determine how current
operations are performed.
5. Review business documents to discover reports,
policies, and how information is used throughout
the organization.
b) Create process diagrams
• The process modeling involves graphically
representing the processes that capture,
manipulate, store and distribute information
between a system and its environment. Most
common diagrams used:
▫ Data flow diagrams (DFD): illustrates the movement
of information between external entities and the
processes and data stores within the system. They
establish the spec’ns of the sys
▫ Computer Aided Software Engineering (CASE) tools
are software suites that automate systems analysis,
design and development. Process models and data
flow diagrams can provide the basis for the automatic
generation of the sys if dvpt using CASE tool
c) Perform buy versus Build Analysis
• Buy (off_the_shelf) Versus Build within the
organization with the organization staff
(bespoke)
• What are the advantages and
disadvantages of either option?
Phase 3: Design
• Involves description of the desired
features and operations of the system
including screen layout, business rules,
process diagrams, pseudo code, and other
documentation. The two primary activities
involved in the design phase are:
▫ Design the IT infrastructure
▫ Design system Models
a) Design the IT Infrastructure
• System must be supported by a solid IT
infrastructure or chances are the system will
crash, malfunction, or not perform as
expected. The IT infrastructure must meet the
org’n’s needs in terms of time, cost, technical
feasibility and flexibility.
• Specifications on the types of clients and
servers that need to be bought including
memory and storage requirements along with
software platform and a database that is large
enough to hold the current volume of
b) Design System Models
• This is the activity of drawing a graphical
representation of a design.
• An organization should model everything
it builds including reports, programs, and
databases.
Modeling activities in design
phase
• Graphical user interface (GUI): is the interface to
an information system. GUI screen design is the ability
to model the information system screens for an entire
system using icons, buttons, menus, and sub menus.
• Data models: represents a formal way to express data
relationships to a database management system
(DBMS)
• Entity Relationship Diagrams (ERD): is a
technique for documenting the relationships btw
entities in a database environment.
• Data Flow Diagrams (DFD): used to model the new
system in graphical form showing the processes, data
flows, data storage and entities that interact with the
system
• Other design task include
▫ Interface design and dialogues (HCI-Human
computer interface): e.g. GUI, command driven,
natural language,
▫ Control Design: to ensure errors of input,
processing, output, file are spotted early
▫ Code design: a sequence of letters or numbers
that represents an item of data that’s more
lengthy cumbersome to uniquely identify data,
classify & sort data, save storage space
• Deliverables: end product of system design is
statement of system specification. The
systems specification is a detailed document
or description the proposed new system. It’s
the new system in paper form.
Phase 4: Development
• Involves taking all of the detailed design
documents from the design phase and
transforming them into the actual system.
Activities involved:
▫ Develop the IT infrastructure before
building the actual system. The org’n
purchases and implements the required
equipment to support the IT infrastructure.
▫ Database and programs: create the DB and
write the programs.
Phase 5: Testing
• Involves testing the whole system for
errors, bugs, interoperability to verify
that the system meets all the business
requirements
• Tasks involved include
▫ Coming up with test data and conditions. I
a test condition does not function correctly,
then the program is send back to develop
for a bug fix.
▫ Perform the system testing as below
Types of tests during testing
phase
• Application (or system) testing: verifies that all units of
code work together and the total system satisfies all of its
functional and operational requirements
• Backup and recovery testing: tests the ability of an
application to be restarted after failure
• Documentation testing: verifies that the instructions
guides are helpful and accurate
• Integration testing: exposes faults in the integration of
software components or software units
• Regression testing: determines if a functional
improvement or repair to the sys has affected other
functional aspects of the software.
• Unit testing: tests each unit of code & its interaction
with other units
• User acceptance testing: enables customers/users to
decide whether or not to accept a system.
Phase 6:
Implementation/Delivery
• Involves placing the system into
production so that users can begin to
perform actual business operations with
the system. Activities involved include:
▫ Training: Online trading, group training,
Train the trainer, workshop training
▫ Documentation
▫ File conversion
▫ Changeover: Parallel, Phased, Pilot,
Direct/plunge
Phase 7: Maintenance
• Is fixing or enhancing an information system.
• Involves performing changes, corrections, additions
and upgrades to ensure the system continues to
meet the business goals.
• Maintenance continues for the life of the system
because the system must change as the business
evolves and its needs change, demanding constant
monitoring, supporting the new sys with frequent
minor changes (e.g. new reports or information
capturing)
• Reviewing the sys to ensure its moving the org’n
towards its strategic goals
Activities involved in the maintenance
• Build a help desk to support the system
users: to respond to internal system user
questions.
• Perform system maintenance
• Provide an environment to support system
changes
Post implementation Review/ Audit
• Post-Implementation Evaluation/Audit
• Post implementation audit is a critical
examination of a system 3-6 months after
it has been put to operation to ensure that
the specified objectives are met and are
justifiable in terms of cost benefit and
other performance criteria.
• Audit focuses on the following:
• Staffing needs – are they more/less than estimated.
• Response time – attempts to assess whether there is any
delay in processing and the consequences of such delays.
Security – establishes the efficiency of the security
procedures (what is the error rates – are there more
errors?)
• User requirements – check whether the users are
satisfied and also check what they feel. (Does the system
meet stated user requirements).
• Running costs – attempts to establish whether the
operational costs are within the stipulated estimates.
• Benefits – establish whether the benefits are being
met/satisfied.
•
• Deliverables
• A report on the review making appropriate
recommendations should be prepared for submission to