Application Development Cycle

Definition

An application development cycle is the cycle consisting of all phases during which a single application is produced and delivered.

Goals

The typical goals of the application development cycle are to:

• Develop a single application that meets the needs of its customer organization.
• Deliver the application to the customer organization.

Objectives

The typical objectives of the application development cycle are to:

• Provide an overview to the development project as a whole in terms of its phases.
• Provide overall organization to its activities and milestones.
• Support top-level scheduling of activities, personnel, and resource acquisition.

Phases

The application development cycle typically includes the following phases:

1. Initiation, which is the first application life cycle phase during which the application’s initial vision, major requirements, and partial architecture are captured so that the application’s scope can be estimated.
2. Construction, which is the second application life cycle phase during which the complete version of the application is developed.
3. Delivery, which is the third application life cycle phase during which the new version of the application is delivered to the customer organization and placed into use by the user organizations.

Figure

The following figure illustrates the application development cycle including its phases and position within the overall business engineering cycle:

Guidelines

• Different cycles contain different phases, depending on the mission of the endeavor.
• Cycles and phases can be combined or decomposed depending on the need for these stages to better map to engagements and contracts between the various organizations.