Waterfall approach was first Process Model to be introduced and followed widely in Software Engineering to ensure success of the project. In “The Waterfall” approach, the whole process of software development is divided into separate process phases.
The stages of “The Waterfall Model” are:
Requirement Analysis & Gathering All possible requirements of the system to be developed are captured in this phase. Requirements are set of functionalities and constraints that the end-user expects from the system. The requirements are gathered from the end-user by consultation, these requirements are analyzed for their validity and the possibility of incorporating the requirements in the system to be development is also studied. Finally, a Requirement Specification document is created which serves the purpose of guideline for the next phase of the model.
System & Software Design Before a starting for coding, it is highly important to understand what we are going to create. System Design helps in specifying hardware and system requirements and also helps in defining overall system architecture. The system design specifications serve as input for the next phase of the model.
Implementation & Unit Testing On receiving system design documents, the work is divided in modules/units and actual coding is started. The system is first developed in small programs called units, which are integrated in the next phase. Each unit is developed and tested for its functionality; this is referred to as Unit Testing.
Integration & System Testing The system is first divided in units which are developed and tested for their functionalities. These units are integrated into a complete system during Integration phase and tested to check if all modules/units coordinate between each other and the system as a whole behaves as per the specifications. After successfully testing the software, it is delivered to the customer.
Operations & Maintenance Generally problems with the system developed (which are not found during the development life cycle) come up after its practical use starts, so the issues related to the system are solved after deployment of the system. Not all the problems come in picture directly but they arise time to time and needs to be solved; hence this process is referred as Maintenance.
There are some disadvantages of the Waterfall Model
1) As it is very important to gather all possible requirements during the Requirement Gathering and Analysis phase in order to properly design the system, not all requirements are received at once, the requirements from customer goes on getting added to the list even after the end of “Requirement Gathering and Analysis” phase, this affects the system development process and its success in negative aspects.
2) The problems with one phase are never solved completely during that phase and in fact many problems regarding a particular phase arise after the phase is signed off, this results in badly structured system as not all the problems (related to a phase) are solved during the same phase.
3) The project is not partitioned in phases in flexible way.
4) As the requirements of the customer goes on getting added to the list, not all the requirements are fulfilled, this results in development of almost unusable system. These requirements are then met in newer version of the system; this increases the cost of system development
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