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Software Engineering Stack Exchange

Questions tagged [sdlc]

Questions about the Software Development Life Cycle (i.e. activities of the software development process, not necessarily related to a specific methodology).

A software development life cycle describes a way to organize all the activities required for the software development process, from the gathering of requirement to the delivery of a tested software product.

The life cycle can follow different models, such as for example the sequential waterfall approach, or an iterative agile approach. It usually address activities such as requirement gathering and analysis, software design, software implementation, testing and other quality assurance activities, delivering the product, all this with more or less details but not necessarily in a sequential way.

Additional readings:

Remarks:

  • the term SDLC is sometimes used to refer to waterfall approach, due to the historical naming of the "Systems development life cycle" which used a strongly phased approach. This understanding should be avoided for this tag.
  • This tag is about "Software development life cycle". Although it has the same acronym it is intended to be more general (see Meta discussion: Tag merge / synonym request: [life-cycle] → [sdlc])

Related tags:

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I've inherited 200K lines of spaghetti code -- what now?

I hope this isn't too general of a question; I could really use some seasoned advice. I am newly employed as the sole "SW Engineer" in a fairly small shop of scientists who have spent the last 10-20 years cobbling together a vast code base. (It was…
kmote
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What to do when time estimation goes wrong?

Let’s say you estimated time for a case to be 3 days. In day two you notice that the case is growing and new scenarios are popping up which were not counted when the time estimation where done. The new finding leads to 2 days extra (total 5 days).…
Amir Rezaei
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How to do documentation for code and why is software (often) poorly documented?

There are some good examples of well-documented code out there, such as java api. But, a lot of code in public projects such as git and internal projects of companies is poorly documented and not very newcomer friendly. In all my software…
Erran Morad
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Dilemma of QA vs. iterations

In my company, we successfully working with agile practices - but without using iterations. The main reason is that we can't find a clean way to fit in QA in an iteration cycle. We understand QA as an extra bit of verification to a certain build…
Wolfgang
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How to introduce Agile to a team that uses rigid non-Agile methods?

Consider a company that is proudly certified for some non-Agile methodology, uses it as a selling point to its customers to demonstrate accountability. How do you go about introducing Kanban or Scrum progressively without breaking their whole…
haylem
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At what point would you drop some of your principles of software development for the sake of more money?

I'd like to throw this question out there to interestingly see where the medium is. I'm going to admit that in my last 12 months, I picked up TDD and a lot of the Agile values in software development. I was so overwhelmed with how much better my…
Martin Blore
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Code review lags behind the Deliver/Test Cycle

In our Agile process we have 2-week Sprints. Tasks are delivered on a daily basis (daily builds), and the Test Team completes their testing immediately the next day or even the same day. We also have Dev code reviews, which require some time (1-2…
gene b.
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How to deal with "software end-of-life" situations?

When a vendor declares that they no longer intend to provide any support or services to a piece of software (and stated the intent to exit the business - offering no upgrade paths), what kind of recourse is available to the customer? Please consider…
rwong
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4 answers

In-house versus Software-development Environment

In the industry, there is a distinction made between an 'in-house development' environment where the software developers are writing code which will be used by the company itself and a proper 'software development' environment where software is…
Isaac Kleinman
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If adding people to a late project makes things worse, what options DO work?

I am working on a project with a fixed deadline (there are financial penalties if we are late or drop any features). We are late. My project manager keeps asking if we can add people so we can get back on track. According to Brook's Law and the…
John Wu
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What is the origin of "deployment environments" (dev/test/staging/prod)?

When reading about software deployment/release, I see many people referring to an idea that Wikipedia calls "deployment environments". The deployment environments of Development, Test, Acceptance and Production are referred to remarkably…
mikewilliamson
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What mistakes in managing software products must be avoided to keep people from hating the vendor?

A previous question about why people hate Microsoft was closed. This is an attempt at a somewhat more constructive question along the same general line. This one is both broader and narrower though. It's more general by being about software vendors…
Jerry Coffin
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What are unique aspects of a software Lifecycle of an attack/tool on a software vulnerability?

At my local university, there is a small student computing club of about 20 students. The club has several small teams with specific areas of focus, such as mobile development, robotics, game development, and hacking / security. I am introducing…
David Kaczynski
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Best way to handle "So, when will this be done by?"

During the daily standup meeting in the middle of a sprint, the de facto project manager/scrum master usually asks developers some version of: "So when will this be done by?" "So can you commit do having this task done by 4pm today?" "How many…
Derek
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What does it mean to "promote" a file?

I hear this term around the office, and know it's relevant to software development lifecycle. What does "promote" mean? Context: e.g. to promote a file.
imagineerThis
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