Requirements analysis is the most important and fundamental stage in SDLC. It is performed by the senior members of the team with inputs from the customer, the sales department, market surveys and domain experts in the industry. This information is then used to plan a basic project approach and to conduct product feasibility studies in the economical, operational, and technical areas.

Once the requirements analysis is complete, the next step is to clearly define and document product requirements and submit them for approval to the customer or the market analysts. A Software Requirement Specification document captures of all the product requirements to be designed and developed during the project life cycle.

Architecture begins with a software design document, which can be at the level of a system or component, and generally describes relevant goals or requirements, static structure (e.g. components, interfaces, dependencies), dynamic behavior (how components interact), data models and external interfaces, deployment considerations (e.g. runtime requirements, third party components). All of these descriptions are at an abstract level. The purpose is to give the reader a broad general understanding of the system or component.

The development team builds and designs software components based on the formal SRS and DDS (above) documents. The development process involves analyzing requirements, modeling and prototyping, coding, compiling and testing. Development occurs in stages called sprints which serve to focus collaboration, planning and reduce risk and uncertainty.

Zen Ledge believes that clear communications is key to meeting expectations. Our sprint meetings and Build/QA/Build cycles ensure that we stay on track, keep you involved, and bake quality into the fabric of your application. During the development process, unit and functional tests verify the functions and tasks of the project. As portions of the development process near completion, the code is submitted for Q/A for user experience/user interface (UX/UI) and process/workflow testing and verification.

This final step includes release management and software maintenance, which encapsulates change management with continuous integration. Putting structure around measuring business performance: One popular method involves instituting an IT Balanced Scorecard, which examines where IT makes a contribution in terms of achieving business goals, being a responsible user of resources and developing people. It uses both qualitative and quantitative measures to get those answers.