The Systems Development Life Cycle (SDLC) as a Standard: Beyond the Documentation

Abstract

Has your company adopted the Systems Development Life Cycle (SDLC) as a standard for benchmarking progress on a project? Have they developed Word and other templates for documents created during SDLC? In three of my most recent positions, the stress was put on completing the documents according to schedule, rather than emphasizing the work. The work involved cataloguing requirements, analyzing them and developing a good design document, and thoroughly testing the resulting code. When I first started programming in SAS®, I was lucky to get any users requirements at all; it was always “I’ll know it when I see it.” But with the emphasis on the documentation, and not on the analytical work behind them, the project still falls behind schedule because of missed requirements. If the requirements are not thoroughly complete when coding begins, it is likely to fail in the testing phase, especially if the independent test team gets a better, more complete version of the requirements than the development team. We discuss the work that is involved in detail for producing sound requirements, design, and testing protocols. Consider the retirement of legacy software as part of the SDLC. Some useful templates (in Excel, perhaps) to help nonprogrammers specify the reports they want.