Introduction
1) Planning
2) Analysis
3) Design
4) Implementation
5) Support

Introduction

The Software Development Life Cycle is a logical systematic process used to develop software and information systems through planning, analysis, design, implementation and support. Through these five steps softwares are built that both satisfy a user's needs and meet a company's expectations. But developing a software is a constant project that is never really done.

The five traditional steps to the Software Development Life Cycle are:

Planning -

This initial phase starts by defining the need. The objective may vary a great deal in nature and form. The purpose of the planning phase is to identify clearly the nature and scope of the business opportunity or problem by performing a preliminary investigation. This entails investigating their current system and what they hope to have in the future. The end product of this phase is a document that defines what kind of cost they will be incurring with implementation of the new system and what kind of benefit they should expect to receive.

Analysis -

In the analysis phase you get further information about what they want and build more in-depth models of what they can expect to achieve with their new system. You should further understand the business requirement and then create a logical model of the new system. The end product for the analysis phase is the system requirements document. This document further describes management and user requirements, alternative plans and what they will cost, any recommendations you may have.

Design -

This is when the project really starts to take form. Engineers plan out all the inputs, outputs, interfaces, processes for the project and create the system design specification from this data. Then the specification is taken to users and management to get their opinion on if the team has taken everything into account an if the new system adequately addresses all their concerns.

Implementation -

The implementation phase is the phase in which the customer gets to see more than just documents describing their system. The engineers and designers construct the new system and begin testing it and documenting it. Typically the team will make a prototype model in either this phase or the design phase to ensure that the system will meet the needs of the customer. Then after everyone is satisfied that the system is ready they will install the product and convert the customers existing format over to the new version. And the customer does a final evaluation to determine if the system is working as they expected and if that the costs and benefits are as they had planned.

Support -

In this, the final phase, the team maintains the system and updates it as necessary to keep up to date with its environment. The staff will also fix minor flaws in the program that were not caught in the other phases. Sometime after the project reaches the support phase the customer will decide that it is time for another upgrade of their system, which restarts the process again.