Discuss the effectiveness of the system development life cycle when designing mobile phone applications for a one person development company.

The System development life cycle is a serious of stages to help create a software, in this case a mobile phone application. The SDLC helps the developer design, test, analyse, evolve, and implement the app that they wish to create. The SDLC helps the developer set out a requirement specification, and from there they can use it to design what features their app should contain. Following on from this is the implementation which is the creation of the mobile app, this is based on the work from the design stage. The app then goes into testing and if the tests come back negative then they go into evolution to fix the problems. The SDLC is a cycle which means that the mobile app can always be improved and changed as and when it needs to be.

There is an issue with creating a mobile application, the first of which is the future development of phones. For example, if the mobile application is based on an iPhone 7 then this could effect how its runs on the next generation because the system functions could change. If the system development life cycle takes a long time to complete (which is often the case due to the many stages which need completing) then by the time the Application is ready to be made available the new iPhone could have already come out and the application will need evolving in order to run on the new phone. The consequence to this is that the application will take longer to design as the finished product may not meet the needs of new products coming into the market. This effects the popularity and the costs of the application as if the application is made to only function on an older product then people will be less likely to use it and if they have to work longer on the product then it could cost them more money.

The second issue with the system development life cycle is that it is very time consuming. The system development life cycle works on many different stages which may take a long time to complete. This could affect the popularity of the new application as by the time the final product has been made a similar product may already be on the market and available to consumers. This creates competition to the application and effects the sales of the application.

From these two examples I have come to the conclusion that the system development life cycle is a useless method for a single developer as it is very time consuming. The time consumption could cause them extra costs, lay backs, and competition which will all effect the popularity and quality of the application that he is trying to produce.