Project Management Design Life Cycle †Free Samples to Students

Question: Discuss about the Project Management Design Life Cycle. Answer: Introduction A proper design lifecycle helps in developing a high quality system that meets the expectation of the customers. A planned approach in a project helps in timely completion of the project. The case study aims at development of an official e commerce website for XYZ Company as a plan to expand their business (Laudon 2013). The project implementation that is the development of website should be completed as soon as possible. The case study discusses in detail the approach or the method of the design life cycle that is used in the project, which is SDLC. The different phases of software development life cycle include requirements, design, implementation, testing, deployment phase, operations and maintenance. The case study analyzes the importance and function of these phases in implementation of a project, which is in this case, is the development of an e commerce website (Highsmith 2013). Software/system Development life cycle (SDLC) is a systemic approach of project management that breaks down the entire project work into a number of phases for proper administration and execution of each phase. It is a framework that defines the different tasks that are performed in the entire lifecycle of software development. It is a methodology that improves the quality and overall development process of a software (Massey and Satao 2012). The different activities or phases of a software development life cycle are planned before the implementation of the project. The company XYZ is planning to develop a secure website to expand their business in field of e commerce. SDLC life cycle is chosen for this project in order to progress with the project in a strategic manner. The different phases of a system development life cycle consist of requirement analysis and feasibility study of the project, planning or the designing phase, implementation or execution phase, testing the system and its deployment followed by the maintenance phase (Alshamrani and Bahattab 2015). Requirement Analysis The requirement analysis of is an important phase of a project development. Considering this project, the different requirement analysis of the project includes detailed planning of the number of pages in the website, designing of database and linking it to the website, selecting an appropriate design of the website, setting up a copyright policy of the website. The company XYZ plans to develop a responsive design and an interactive website and therefore, proper research is necessary before implementing the project (Bassil 2012). This step of design lifecycle is very essential to determine the expected schedule and cost of a project. Apart from coding, one of the major aspects of a good website is its design and ease of usage. Another major part of requirement analysis is performing a detailed feasibility study of the project. The company has already laid a feasibility research. Market value analysis of the project declares the project is feasible to implement. Feasibility study ensures that a project is justifiable legally, technically and economically. Hence, this is considered as a major phase of a design life cycle. The economic feasibility is mostly considered in implementation of small projects such as development of website. The payback and cost benefit analysis is important to evaluate in order to estimate the payback period of the website (Balaji and Murugaiyan 2012). Designing phase is another major aspect of a design life cycle. In the project discussed, a proper design of the website has to be laid. Apart from coding of the website, selecting an appropriate design of the web pages making use of the CSS is required to make the website look attractive. The design of a website plays a vital role in increasing the traffic of the website. SDLC model of project development have a dedicated designing phase that plays a vital role in development of any project. The designing phase of the website development for XYZ Company consists of appointing a content writer who would identify and manage the contents that should be incorporated in the website. Furthermore, the design phase also deals with the designing of the user interface of the user. The company has planned to develop a responsive website; therefore, the design should be based on supporting the interactive feature of the e commerce website to be developed (Fuggetta Di Nitto 2014). The implementation phase is the third and most important phase of a SDLC model. This is an important phase of a design life cycle as the project team members work for developing the actual product or the software in this phase. SDLC is a non-iterative process and therefore, implementation phase follows the design phase of the project life cycle. In this particular project of developing a website, the implementation phase mainly deals with the coding of software. This phase can be further subdivided into two parts, one is designing of the front end of the website that is coding of the interface, while the other is coding of the database followed by linking the database with the website. Proper implementation of the database of the website is as important aspect of a website development. The website to be developed is an e commerce website and therefore ensuring a securing website is essential. The transaction details and the personal information of the customers that will be saved in the database should be properly encrypted to maintain the data confidentiality. This must be included in the coding phase of the software development. The implementation phase is considered as the most important phase of software development life cycle as it focuses on building the web according to the set design (Stark 2015). HTML language and CGI is used as basic coding language along with java script. Knowing the definite purpose and goal of a website is essential for proper implementation of a website. In the designing phase, the design of the website is laid according to the target audience. Furthermore, a set goal is important to evaluate how the website is going to perform or whether it has any scope of improvement in future. The knowledge about the target audience helps in designing and developing the appropriate content (Barnes and Hunt 2013). Implementation phase of the software development is followed by the testing phase in a design life cycle. The SDLC approach discussed in this case study also deals with an extensive testing phase of the software to unhide the bugs present in the system. The testing phase is one of the major aspects of a design life cycle as it helps in eliminating the bugs from the system. Software testing is generally required to point out the defects and errors that are made during the development phases of the project. Testing is furthermore important to ensure the quality of the product. Testing measures how effective, the performance of the software is and therefore, it is a crucial step of any design life cycle. This phase of SDLC allows the coders or the developers to check whether the code and the program working according to the set criteria (Lewis 2016). In this project, all types of functional testing have been carried put in order to unveil the bugs present in the system. These includes unit testing, integration testing and system testing includes the white box and black box testing. The code developed was needed to be tested against the requirements in order to ascertain whether the product is solving the needs that were gathered during the requirement analysis phase. This phase is followed by the testing phase and includes delivery of a finished product to the client. This phase of SDLC consist of beta testing that is required to identify the bugs that might be still present in the system. If any bug is caught in this phase, the engineering team is at once reported about the bug so that the issue can be fixed. Once the engineering team resolves the issues, the final deployment of the software can take place. The initial deployment phase of the software includes a project review by the project management team to know about the views of the customer (Model 2015). This phase of a design lifecycle model helps to enables the product to be used in real environment generally by the end users of the product. However, there are certain rules of the deployment phase that should be followed by the project team in order to ensure the appropriate deployment of the code and technology. One of the major phases of deployment is preparation and procedure phase wh ere the project teams should generally install the software and ensures proper installation. The project team members are responsible for proper installation of the software and instruct the users about the working of the software in the information technology environment (Sabale and Dani 2012). After the installation phase of the software, the project team members implement the code and the program to different systems in the location of deployment such as an organization. This is an extensive process since every computer of the organization should be deployed with the software developed. Another major functionality of the deployment phase of the software includes the client sign off phase or transferring the ownership to the business owner. This indicates that after the successful deployment of the software, the business owner will be responsible for the maintenance of the system (Mishra and Dubey 2013). In the project of development of an e commerce website for XYZ Company, the initial deployment phase includes launching the website for performing the beta testing. Once the beta testing is successfully completed and the identified bugs are removed, the final website launching is carried out. The successful launching of the website marks the end of the deployment phase of the SDLC model. In the end of the deployment phase, the project team members generally gather the customers feedback in order to improve the successive projects. With the end of the deployment phase, the project marks its end (Alshamrani and Bahattab 2015). However, in order to ensure proper functioning of the website, proper maintenance of the same is essential. Therefore, maintenance phase is a crucial phase of a design life cycle. Maintenance phase of the software comes into play once the system or the software is operational. This is generally done to implement certain changes in the system or the software for ensuring the smooth operation of the system. Furthermore, the system or software might require addition of new requirements that are generally evaluated in the maintenance phase (Stoica, Mircea and Ghilic-Micu 2013). After the successful deployment of the new website for XYZ Company, the operational bugs are identified in the maintenance phase. Maintenance phase deals with handling of the residual errors that can exist in a software even after a thorough testing phase. It is further used to monitor the performance of the system, rectifying the operational bugs present on the system and enhancing the performance of the system. Furthermore, this is crucial for linking the experiences of the customers with the organization. Conclusion Therefore, from the above discussion, it can be deduced that using a proper design life cycle is very essential for successful implementation of a project. This case study deals with the deployment of an e commerce website for XYZ Company following a proper design life cycle model, which is SDLC. The software development lifecycle model is a non-iterative process that plans the development of a system or a software in a systematic way. The case study discusses the different phases of the SDLC model and explains in brief how these phases were implemented for developing an e commerce website for XYZ Company. The software development life cycle model is used for this project, as it is a conceptual model that includes policies and procedures for proper implementation of the project. Testing phase is the most important phase of a design life cycle model as it unveils the bugs present in the system and also checks whether the system is developed according to the requirements. References Alshamrani, A. and Bahattab, A., 2015. A comparison between three SDLC models waterfall model, spiral model, and Incremental/Iterative model.International Journal of Computer Science Issues (IJCSI),12(1), p.106. Balaji, S. and Murugaiyan, M.S., 2012. Waterfall vs. V-Model vs. Agile: A comparative study on SDLC.International Journal of Information Technology and Business Management,2(1), pp.26-30. Barnes, S. and Hunt, B. eds., 2013.E-commerce and v-business. Routledge. Bassil, Y., 2012. A simulation model for the waterfall software development life cycle.arXiv preprint arXiv:1205.6904. Fuggetta, A. and Di Nitto, E., 2014, May. Software process. InProceedings of the on Future of Software Engineering(pp. 1-12). ACM. 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