The Systems Development Life Cycle Methodology - Essay Example

Moreover, the other steps of system development lifecycle includes a comprehensive system design and actual implementation and testing (DocStoc, 2009; Shelly & Rosenblatt, 2009; Pressman, 2001). However, a lot of researches have shown that the use of traditional software development life cycle causes various issues and concerns regarding effective software development. This paper is aimed at presenting a number of issues which significantly control the process of the software development and can be changed to offer more flexible and unstructured approach for software development (DocStoc, 2009; Shelly & Rosenblatt, 2009; Pressman, 2001).

Actually, the traditional software development lifecycle is composed of a rigid set of development stages that are aligned to each other in a less flexible way. As a result, entire software development process faces several serious issues and concerns regarding software development. For example, what if the design stage of a software development process uncovers requirements that are strictly impracticable or very expensive to establish or develop? What if issues and errors found in the software requirements and design stages are encountered in implementation phase?

In addition, the time duration between preliminary investigation and testing typically spread over several months. What if basic needs, requirements or priorities of a client are changed or system users understand they ignored critical needs all through the software development analysis phase? In fact, there are numerous issues and concerns which make the traditional software development lifecycle a more rigid and inflexible process. In addition, there can be numerous other issues which can create serious problems for entire software development process and can result in projects failure or do not able to convene the user’s expectations when deployed (DocStoc, 2009; Shelly & Rosenblatt, 2009; Pressman, 2001).

In order to analyze issues and problems in traditional rigid and inflexible software development approach, I will present some facts and figures from international software development reports. In this scenario, Standish Group's well-known CHAOS Report of 2000 shows that more than 25 percent software development projects still fail. In many cases projects suffer from issues and problems as a result it becomes a failure, or without practical software deployment. Unluckily, this report demonstrates a huge increase over CHAOS reports from previous years.

Moreover, at the present there is additional proof of the same kind (VersionOne, Inc., 2012; Bender RBT Inc., 2003; Erdil, Finn, Keating, Meattle, Park, & Yoon, 2003). In addition, failure issues and numbers strengthen what a vast majority of us experienced personally. Additionally, the waterfall software development approach is a risky and expensive methodology to develop software systems. That is why, majority of software development firms is adopting agile and new software development methodologies for the reason that they are more flexible and innovative alternatives (VersionOne, Inc.

, 2012; Bender RBT Inc., 2003; Erdil, Finn, Keating, Meattle, Park, & Yoon, 2003). Moreover, when we look for a better approach for software development we see Agile as one of best approaches. In fact, agile software development techniques came out of the real-life development experiences of experienced and skilled software professionals who had practiced the main issues and