Agile SDLC and Its Phases: A Promising Software Development Life Cycle Model

Change is the only constant, and that is pretty much evident in the world of businesses. Companies keep coming up with newly invented software products that often put the others behind. Thus, it is quite imperative to stay important in today's market, given that it is competitive.

To stay intact, businesses need to make sure their software development teams actively manage and perform well to bring their software products in front of the world in a short span.

The Agile software development procedure was developed for the same, to allow the companies to have quick growth and utilization of their software in the right manner.

In brief, the Agile software development life cycle is a blend of the iterative and incremental process to work on its flexibility and create customer satisfaction by doing the fast delivery of software products. The agile method works as the most simplified and beneficial way to break the planning of the project into small incremental builds.

The advantages of the same include:

* It works as the realistic approach to work on projects

* Ensures the teamwork is done well without any conflicts as it makes things all-clear

* It is fast and avoids any sort of delay

* It does not require a lot of resources

* It makes working on projects quite easier and manageable

* A little planning requires as it splits them into teams in small increments

* It is flexible

Now that you are aware of how beneficial it is, let us have the look at the stages of the Agile software development life cycle (SDLC) and know if they are suitable for your company:

1. The Planning Phase: Scope Out and Prioritize Projects

If your company wants to determine your new projects' success, you need to look at their scope in the coming times. If that looks beneficial for your customers in the long run to each of your team members, you should decide to go ahead with the same. Moreover, make sure you are giving the required time and importance to those projects.

Thus, this way, you should define your business opportunities and work on the time that will take to complete the project. Once you can determine the scope of the project, you will be able to see how feasible it is and decide the worth of it.

2. The Feasibility Analysis Phase: Create Diagrams and Analysis the possibilities

Visuals make things easier to plan. After completing the process of determining the scope of your projects, move ahead and simplify it into diagrams for better analysis.

At this stage, you must confirm your product's feasibility for the target market through various methods.

3. The Prototyping Phase: Design a Model and an Action Plan

Discuss the projects with your teams, and create flow charts and other easily understandable diagrams based on those discussions. It would make planning easier for you and clear confusion for all the team members. In short, creating diagrams of the projects will help you know how the project will work.

In the same stage, you need to distribute the work among different teams and create deadlines for its completion.

4. The Development Phase: Create a Functional Solution

Once you are done with the process of deciding the work parameters of the project, then the next step will be to begin working. This is the crucial stage for UX designers and developers as now is the time to turn the planning into computer software. This is important and needs to be done soon as it would require changes and multiple rounds of revisions.

Besides that, it will also show your clients the entire planning software-based.

5. The Testing Phase: Release and Plan to Produce

You are finally at this stage where you know how your software looks. This step is also one of the imperative ones as you are supposed to show your product to the world. Thus, before you release the product into the world, make sure you perform the following steps carefully:

* Test if the system is functioning well, has no bugs, and is working as you planned. The quality assurance team should be actively working on this.

* Work on the defects, if any

* Once you are done with the process of checking its functionality, then finalize it

* The Last step, check the work done so far into production and view it as customers

6. The Deployment Phase: Production and Support

Now that you know you have carefully worked and checked your project, it is time for you to produce it and ask for minimal support from your team for the software release. Make sure that you collect genuine feedback as well. That will help you to know if you would require any modification in future projects. In short, you need your teams' support to make sure the system is running smoothly as expected and help out your customers in knowing how to use it.

7. The Maintenance Phase: Monitor Operations and Continually Improve the product

If you have reached this stage in reality, know that you have successfully worked on the entire new project. Now is the time for celebration as you have been able to stay relevant in today's market, and came up with a new software product for your customers in a short time.

Now, during the maintenance stage, developers must take care of bug-fixing, troubleshooting, regular maintenance tasks, updating the related systems, improving security and other such essentials.

Also, because a successful product keeps on improving, you must also think of the improvement scope in your project. Frequently updating the software and releasing new features keep your end-users engaged. It also invokes a sense of security and trustworthiness for your software product in the market, attracting new users.

An additional Phase: Software Product Retirement

This stage will end the production phase and work on its retirement.

Software solutions sometimes keep on re-inventing, but most of the time (even the best ones!), go out of the market. But the thing to understand at this stage is that you should do it decently and systematically when you leave the digital landscape.

Product retirement should be done in a way that doesn't affect your loyal customers adversely. Even in case of failure, you should have a retirement policy that respects user rights and their data.

Give prior notice, remind users to take a backup of their data, announced the closure, and do it all that leaves a happy last impression on your product's end-users.

The Final Word

We hope you are feeling encouraged to work on your projects after reading this. Working on new projects can be frustratingly daunting as that asks for so much hard work, patience, and whatnot. However, we assure you that it would be all worth it in the end if you put your heart into working on the project. Following Agile SDLC phases will simplify things for you.