How the Software Development Life Cycle helped me

While searching for better ways to plan a web project I found the the Software Development Lifecycle. This is a process that consists of several stages for building and running software applications. It is like a checklist of sorts, there are 6 stages in total, I used 5 of these as the final stage was not applicable.

1. Planning

The first phase of this lifecycle is the planning phase, here I set out the requirements of my website. What I wanted my website to do, how I thought I wanted my website to look. In simple terms, I made a plan for what I intended to use my website for.

1. Analysis

The second phase looks at defining these requirements, I used user stories for this. This identified what I as the owner of the website wanted and why and also what users of the website may want and why. An example of this would be “As a visitor of Rachael’s Recipes I want a navigation bar so that I can easily navigate the website.”. This then creates an acceptance criteria or a task list of what should be done to adhere to this requirement. Throughout this stage and using the user stories I created a backlog of the documented requirements.

1. Design

The third stage of this life cycle is the designing phase. During this phase, I created a mock-up of my website. This gave me a visual of where to start and my end goal.

1. Implementation

Stage four is the building stage, this is when I began to develop my website. I based my development process off the previous stage, using the requirements backlog as a guide to prioritising tasks that needed to be completed.

1. Testing and Integration

The final stage I used was the testing phase. This looked at all aspects of my website, making sure everything worked the way I wanted it to work and whether the website was visually how I wanted.

The final thing I looked at as part of my testing phase was how accessible my website was. I used the Google Lighthouse report to test my website. This report looks at the performance of the website, the accessibility, the best practices of the website and the search engine optimisation. This was very helpful in understanding how to better my website, as it gives you examples on how to fix specific issues such as font and background contrast for accessibility (see appendix 4 for some report details).

Using the Software Development Lifecycle was an immense aid in creating a building my website, it provided a more structured outline for what needed to be completed.

Cover image reference:

WeeTech Solutions Pvt Ltd, 2023, "Software-Development-Life-Cycle" [Online], Available at: https://www.weetechsolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Software-Development-Life-Cycle.png (Accessed: 12/09/2023)