List the strengths and challenges of each of the following four system development life cycles:?

Question

1. Traditional Systems Development Life Cycle

2. Prototyping

3. Rapid Application Development

4. End-User System Development Life Cycle

Answer 1

1. Traditional Systems Life Cycle (which includes things like waterfall or spiral) have their strength in having a very structured sequence of steps where each step has to be completed as a prerequisite for the next step. The drawback is that most of the time you might be working on a project which each phase has to be on a certain timeline and that some parts only need to have two prior tasks done before starting it. (Like on a Gantt chart)

2. Prototyping... its strength is that it gives clients the ability to feel and see a demo so they can more quickly identify project requirements. A "test drive" mentality. It can help flush out thoughts that may have yet been identified but are important to the project. The problem is that if not handled carefully with the demo development, developers can get bogged down in adding and making changes to a demo, preventing the development of the real thing. It also can lead to going overboard and creating what is known as "feature bloat"

3. Rapid application development... this actually can work hand in hand with prototyping, but rapid application developments strength is producing software quickly to meet tight turn around development times. Prototyping accomplishes this by providing the demo which can quickly nail down what the requirements are and rapid application development (aka RAD) is usually used to construct the demo.

4. End User System Development life Cycle.... this isn't one I actually heard used officially anywhere, but they are probably referring to selfsourcing cycles where the strength is that the people using the system on a daily basis are the ones that determine what the system needs to do to make things easier. The final system then matches as closely as possible the duties of the users rather than what managers think their users want. The problem is that it can be too tightly coupled to individual users and features that may be important to only 2 users are implemented in a system designed to be used by 200 users. That feature could be implemented at the cost of a feature that all 200 users might want to use.

The most common ones I find in industry these days are definitely prototyping and RAD. Companies want to decrease the time to develop software and those methodologies help with that.

Hope it helps!