Software Life Cycle

Software is not created overnight.

A program goes through many phases from the time it is first conceived until the time it is retired, called the life cycle of the program.

The three fundamental stages through which a program goes are:

• development,
• use,
• and maintenance

Development

The software development phase is the first and perhaps most important phase of the software life cycle.

A program that is well developed will be easy and less expensive to maintain.

Source: https://www.dreamstime.com/professional-development-programmer-working-programming-website-software-coding-technology-writing-codes-data-code-image132331729

Software engineers typically break the software development process into the following four phases:

• Analysis
• Design
• Implementation
• Testing and debugging

Use

Once the program is considered complete, it is released for the user to use. Once user start using the program, they most certainly discover problems or have suggestion to improve it.

Maintenance

In the software maintenance process, the program is modified to fix the (identified) problems and/or to enhance it. If there are serious/numerous changes, version of the program is created and released for use.

When a program is considered too expensive to maintain, the developer might decide to retire the program and no new version of the program will be released.

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References:

Malik, D. S. (2010). Data Structures Using C++ (2nd Ed.). Cambridge, Massachusetts: Course Technology. ISBN-13: 978-0-324-78201-1