The software development life cycle defines boundaries for developers, business analysts, and stakeholders as an instrumental part of the development process.
Developers across Europe, accounting for 5.5 million software engineers, use the software development life cycle (SDLC) and its five phases to deliver improved software results.
Besides, 1 in 4 companies outsource software development to reduce costs, rush the products to market faster, and be more flexible in the software outcomes.
Many clients overlook the primary reason for outsourcing software development to teams like Pulsion Technology who use the benefits of Requiment requirements and analysis tools.
Dedicated developers know that unclear requirements are one of the main reasons software launches fail. Let us explain why you need it, and how it works.
What Is a Software Development Lifecycle?
A software development life cycle (SDLC) describes a methodology to clearly define processes to deliver high-quality software. Development teams can begin the development phase with detailed user stories, analysed customer requirements, user input, and functional specifications from the start.
What Are the Advantages of a Software Development Life Cycle?
The advantages of a software development life cycle (SDLC) include the following:
- Project managers have specific deliverables and performance parameters in each phase
- Improved client and development team relationships throughout the entire process
- A higher-quality software system based on data and analysis
- A faster architecture and design documents delivery with a basic working model
- Have a detailed description of risk assessment and analysis to prevent failure
Why Are Requirements Gathering Important for an SDLC?
The benefits of requirements gathering include the following:
- SDLC requirements gathering ensures a project’s expected timeline
- Software developers do the work right the first time
- Reduce the costs and risk of failure in software projects
- Find the right stakeholders to understand their user and business objectives fully
- Project managers transform customer requirements into a software solution
Why Does Requirements Analysis Matter in an SDLC?
A comprehensive requirement analysis helps to gather more detailed software requirements or to derive software requirements that fit the business requirements better.
Good read: How To Gather Requirements As A Business Analyst
Here are some of the requirements analysis advantages:
- The end software product will meet user and client expectations
- It identifies requirements gaps and inconsistencies
- It can save time and resources later in the software development life cycle process
- The project team won’t misinterpret or misunderstand the client’s needs
- All stakeholders are on the same page before software development begins
5 SDLC Requirements Gathering / Analysis Phases
A requirement analysis, functional requirement specification document, and detailed description of user interface requirements are only a small part of the SDLC. Proper requirement management tools help you with a guided process through each SDLC requirements analysis phase, including Requiment.
See how Requiment benefits your SDLC. However, let’s see how each of the ten SDLC phases works.
Phase 1: SDLC Requirements Gathering
The SDLC requirements gathering phase is one of the first stages in developing a top-notch software product, with steps of its own. Delivering software that meets business objectives and customer requirements will improve the chance your software product succeeds in a competitive market.
Step 1: Define Business Objectives
The simplest requirement-gathering example is to elicit business goals and needs related to a software platform first. With a non-disclosure agreement signed, clients often discuss the primary objectives for the intended software development or system upgrade.
What does the business need from a program? A business objective is a long-term result a company seeks to accomplish a vision or goal, whether it’s higher profits or gaining a competitive advantage over others. These objectives typically fall under social, human, organic, and economic.
Understand what objectives are versus goals to ensure you define the right kind.
Step 2: Identify Stakeholders
Customer inputs aren’t the only place to gather requirements. You must identify all the stakeholders before converting business requirements into a document after the analysis phase. A customer requirement specification document involves collecting business requirements in requirement gathering.
However, derived user stories, user interface requirements, and implementation detail rely on a requirement-gathering technique that includes all stakeholders. Stakeholders define clients, businesses, end users, or even a third-party vendor. Stakeholders are people affected by the software product.
Step 3: Elicit Stakeholder Requirements
Formal requirement elicitation meetings are cornerstones of stakeholder requirement elicitation, but they don’t get to every stakeholder. The requirement-gathering process relies on multiple techniques to help analysts gather the right information for software applications.
Elicit requirements from stakeholders using the following techniques:
- Analyse customer natural language documents
- Analyse user inputs and interfaces on similar software
- Brainstorming stakeholder sessions
- Interviews with stakeholders
- Prototyping and sampling
- Requirement-gathering workshops
- Stakeholder focus groups
- Surveys and questionnaires
Also, you could rely on user stories to gather requirements. For example, you could use this story from the user’s perspective: “I should be able to see out of the rearview mirror with a surround-view camera system.” Consider a user’s perspective when eliciting requirements for requirement analysis.
Learn more about phase one in our complete guide to requirements gathering in 2024.
Phase 2: SDLC Requirements Analysis
The requirements analysis phase defines the process of learning from and understanding the requirements gathered in phase one. Analysing the requirements ensures they are complete, feasible, and consistent. The requirements analysis phase has expected steps within the SDLC.
Each requirement is analysed from three perspectives:
- Technical specifications analysis
- Operational specifications analysis
- Business requirements analysis
Step 1: Understand and Document Customer Expectations
Customer expectations play a pivotal role in the requirement analysis phase. We analyse requirements according to how clients anticipate a software product’s features, performance, and functionality. Understanding these expectations helps our software developers align the end product with user needs.
The business requirements gathered in phase one provide guidelines and customer specifications about a software product. Now, a project manager or business analyst documents the expectations to ensure they align with the software product’s technical and operational specifications.
Our functional vs business requirements explained article helps you better define customer expectations.
Step 2: The Requirements Analysis Classification Process
A requirement analysis phase is a systematic approach to ensure business requirements, user needs, and product specifications align before software development. It’s an integral part of a software development life cycle and includes software quality engineers defining a precise development process.
The second step in the requirement analysis process is to categorise business and user requirements into software requirements, which include functional requirements and non-functional requirements.
Functional requirements define how a software product responds to user inputs. Meanwhile, non-functional requirements describe the attributes of a software system.
Read about the difference in “What Are Functional and Non-Functional Requirements.”
Step 3: The Requirements Analysis Prioritisation Process
Step three of the requirement analysis phase in the software development life cycle is to prioritise requirements and specifications. Requirements may exceed the resources for a software project. In that case, business analysts use prioritisation techniques to ensure the project remains within its scope.
Some popular requirements prioritisation techniques include:
- Hundred Dollar Method – Stakeholders divide a supposed $100 among the requirements.
- Kano Analysis – Rating the satisfaction and dissatisfaction levels of each requirement.
- MoSCow Method – Each requirement is a must-have, should-have, could-have, or would-have.
- Numerical Grouping – Each requirement is critical, moderate, or optional according to user needs.
- Ranking – An ordinal scale that ranks criteria with numerical value based on relevance.
Read more about prioritisation in requirements prioritisation: making informed decisions.
Phase 3: Define Requirements for an SDLC
The defining requirements for a software development life cycle phase include factors that determine the software development process timeline and detailed specifications delivery. After the requirement analysis phase, you’ll have objective and atomic requirements.
An atomic requirement is one you can measure, test, and trace. It has enough details to define a software requirement specification document (SRSD), user stories, or technical specifications for software programmers. Validation can help to define atomic requirements for whole system software.
The following steps define atomic requirements:
- Define the functional or non-functional purpose of the requirement
- Break each requirement into a detailed description
- Distinguish measurable steps in the detailed descriptions
- Apply use cases to fill any remaining gaps
- Analyse the data results to determine whether the requirement is atomic
- Move well-defined or atomic requirements to the documentation phase
Phase 4: Detailed Software Requirements Documentation
A software architecture requirement is the documents and specifications for the whole software system to begin the acceptance testing phase. Software requirements documents outline the project’s scope for stakeholders while preparing the development team for requirements beta testing.
The incorrect implementation of requirements into functional features and non-functional requirements results in potential project failure. The requirement analysis phase revealed high-priority requirements, while the defining phase revealed atomic or measurable requirements.
Business analysts will detail the product’s requirements on a product requirements document (PRD) or software requirements document (SRD). The analyst will include diagrams, user stories, and details regarding recommended security access, software libraries, and other software specifications.
Read more about this phase in our effective requirements documentation best practices for beginners.
Phase 5: SDLC Requirements Acceptance Testing
Testing is crucial in the software development life cycle after a thorough requirement analysis, requirement definition, and writing of detailed specifications documents. Also, called unit testing, this phase is where you test and measure each specific part of your atomic software requirements.
Unit testing lets developers test the smallest parts of software applications in the SRD documents. It isolates written code to determine whether the sum of a requirement works as intended. Each unit of an application requirement is then scrutinised for proper operations after software development.
How does it work?
The testing phase is also known as prototyping, which allows users to interact with the product for an initial beta test. The SDLC testing phases consist of five steps, including:
- Plan unit and product testing according to the documented requirements.
- Test the prototype units and products with actual users.
- Record the feedback from prototyping user interactions.
- Compare the feedback and results to the desired outcomes.
- Use the results to change requirements to better suit launch results.
Software System Development Life Cycle Facts
The SDLC also comprises more information than the five phases. Let’s show you how it differs from other life cycle management plans, and which methodologies are most used.
Most Common SDLC Models
Some developers offer off-the-shelf software development, while others use custom software development. Both developers rely on a list of common methodologies to complete the SDLC process.
Development teams use the following SDLC models or methodologies to complete the five phases:
- Agile Methodology
- DevOps Methodology
- Extreme Programming
- Incremental Development
- Iterative Development
- The Big Bang Model
- The Rational Unified Process
- The SCRUM Model
- The V-Model
- The Waterfall Method
SDLC vs Application Lifecycle Management (ALM)
The SDLC focuses on the life cycle of your software development process, but ALM is the life cycle for the entire application development process. SDLC is only a part of the ALM phases in application development.
SDLC vs Systems Development Lifecycle
The systems development life cycle only focuses on the development of a system without gathering or analysing requirements, unlike the SDLC, which focuses on five phases.
SDLC vs Software Testing Lifecycle (STL)
The software testing lifecycle (STL) describes the testing phase of the SDLC and doesn’t include the first four phases of the software development lifecycle.
SDLC vs Product Development Lifecycle (PDLC)
The product development lifecycle (PDLC) defines the development phase, including prototyping the product and its units for testing.
SDLC vs Software Release Life Cycle (SRLC)
The SDLC describes the phases, including gathering requirements, analysing the requirements, documenting software requirements, and prototyping the product for testing. However, the software release lifecycle refers to the phase after SDLC, which includes the product launch and maintenance.
Summing Up SDLC Requirements Gathering
A requirement analysis and gathering process can save your software development time, money, and the potential risk of failure. A requirement analysis is instrumental in defining what’s functional and non-functional. A requirement analysis is also essential to categorise the requirements correctly.
Sign up or book a demo to see how our Requiments online tool automates every step if you wish to complete the gathering and analysis process for your business. Our tool also offers a guided process with demo videos to help you through an SDLC. More features we offer include:
- Output reports to visualise your SDLC
- Create wireframes to helps a development team visualise your requirements
- Update easily your requirements for changes based on the analysis phase
- Task generation to speed up development processes
Alternatively, book an appointment with our digital strategy consultants at Pulsion to meet the team and discuss outsourcing software development services.
SDLC Frequently Asked Questions
What Are Software Requirements in the Software Development Life Cycle?
Software requirements are found in a software requirements specifications (SRS) document. They outline the specifications for functional and non-functional requirements to finish the software’s tools, features, interactive parts, and performance.
What Are Non-Functional Requirements in an SDLC?
Non-functional requirements (NFRs) define a system’s attributes, constraints, and operational abilities. For example, NFRs define the system’s performance, scalability, portability, reliability, availability, security, usability, and compatibility.
What Is Requirements Gathering in an SDLC?
Off-the-shelf or custom web design and development need directions. The developers, analysts, software engineers, and stakeholders need to be on the same page, knowing specifics before development happens. Otherwise, you won’t get what you need from your software.
What Is the Requirements Analysis Phase in an SDLC?
The analysis phase in SDLC describes how business or requirements analysts define whether requirements are necessary before categorising and prioritising each one to ensure they fit the objectives of your business.
How Can You Integrate Security Into a Software Development Life Cycle?
Security integration in an SDLC happens through the following steps:
- An initial review of security requirements
- Threat modelling in the definition stage
- Design the security features in the design phase
- Write the code for the security features
- Assess the risks in the deployment phase
- Use risk mitigation strategies, such as prioritising, evaluating, and implementing controls
- Benchmark the application against industry standards
- Continue to maintain the security applications in the maintenance phase
How Can You Integrate DevSecOps Into an SDLC?
A development team will identify your company’s need for security before analysing your software development environment for potential threats and risks. Then, the team will integrate security testing and analysis to improve your current security features at every step of the SDLC.