Question

Question 1 (50 marks)
Systems Development Life Cycle (SDLC) has been a concept for building new or
re-engineering legacy systems since 1960’s. Using this top down approach has
many beneficial elements from clearly defined objectives to proper system testings
before implementation. However, there are many key contrary elements as well.
Discuss 10 (ten) with examples.

Answer 1

Hi,

Please find short essay about SDLC disadvantages and examples below.

Kindly upvote.

Usually SDLC will involue Planning, requirement analysis,Design,Development,Integration and testing,Implementation,
operations and maintainance,and deployment all in one shot.
Contrary to belief from 1960's there are many drawbacks to SDLC.

Below are few,

1>Expensive:
   Since all the stages of software development lifecycle needs to be completed before deployment, it can be quite expensive.
Since it requires team of high level of experts to analyse risk, since lot of time is required to come to final stage, expenses are large.

2>Time wastage:
   Since before hand we need to plan all the stages of development, number of phases and rework is unknown, time management is key factor here.

3>Human errors:
   Usually humans are not good at visualising everything before hand and actually practising it, so there is large level of abstraction.

4>Applicable to only simple projects and not large ones:
   since evolutionary projects will have many adds and deletes , and many stakeholders involved,
SDLC might be suitable for larger projects , with lot of money and time. And not for smaller projects.

5>Just in case additions:
   since requirement gathering in traditional model, is only one stage. We might add few 'Just in case' requirements, eventually at the end they might not be
required. Also client might not be that knowledgeable to define complete project, it might lead to more assumptions then definitions and facts.

6>Not applicable to new digital era:
   since todays time, Time is money, taking year long and developing a project might not be a good idea and un acceptable.
small executable agile methodology is perfect fit for todays era and peoples minds.

7>Maintenance difficulty:
   since full and final project is delivered at once, if any changes are requested it might be difficult to implement and also costly to
implement, so there is little room for changes.

8>compromising on quality:
   since testing phase is devoid of development cycle, we might discover errors later in life cycle.
It might take fortune to fix and go through unit/Integration/deployment stages again.

9>Huge Documentation:
   since whole project needs documentation at last, it might be cumbersome, not very adaptive.
Also there is so much relying on documentation, usually people who have developed might have forgot till they reach end of the project.

10>
Last but not least, needs good leadership team:
   To involve everyone right from requirement to deployment, to take them forward in mutually reinforcing way, without conflicts between people,
and bad feelings is a task in itself.
  

Some examples:

1>real life example is of Buffer, social media tool, in which they had remove retweets within few weeks.
which was difficult since they followed waterfall model of SDLC.

2>Few other example are capers Jones, Military analyst projects of US. Failure rate was around 70 to 85 % and millions of dollars wastage and rework.

starting work and getting feedback from Realtime users should be in days span. if not because SDLC huge time gap , Facebook,NASA projects had to reiterate though phases because
real customer requirement was already changed.

usually waterfall combined agile methodologies is what is followed in many IT projects now.

Thanks.