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Rapid Application Development And Early Phases Of The Software Development Cycle

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specifications are documented in detail which will lay the foundation of that software development cycle. This requirement documentation defines what the software will do and how it will do it and will also come in handy when there are future developments. Since all the specification documents are prepared early on and presented to the customers and developments team, any design changes that need to be made are captured in the early stages of the lifecycle which minimizes effort and time later during the design phase or the implementation phase when the coding is already done and more resources would be required to make necessary changes. Once the requirements are gathered and documented, use cases and business model is generated that will …show more content…

As this phase is an iterative phase, it allows users to provide feedback on the design and modify any design aspect which needs modification. It is repeated as often as necessary. The next phase is the construction phase where the actual application is developed and a prototype is generated. The users are involved in this phase as well to suggest any changes in the actual project screens or reports. This approach has several advantages – any existing problems be it design or logic can be fixed earlier in the software development lifecycle instead of later in the stages which would is more expensive to address. Another advantage of the prototyping model is that users could see and use the software prototype and are more involved throughout the development. This resulted in less surprises at the end because the users know exactly what they are getting. In this paper I will be discussing the above two methodologies used in developing two different software projects. The articles that my discussion is based upon are cited at the end of the paper – - For Indiana University, the transition of their Course Management System (CMS) to Oncourse (CL) proved to be one such projects where the training and education team which previously used waterfall development methodology to produce their training materials realized shortly after that using the traditional methodology wouldn’t work. In waterfall method, the sequence of the project is extremely linear and project is broken

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