System Development Life Cycle

System Development Life Cycle

System Development Life Cycle is a method for evaluating 'the whole life of a product', that is all the stages involved, such as raw materials acquisition, manufacturing, distribution and retail, use and reuse and maintenance, recycling and waste management, in order to create less environmentally harmful products. System Development Life Cycle consists of: inventory analysis (selecting items for evaluation and quantitative analysis), impact analysis (evaluation of impacts on ecosystem), and improvement analysis (evaluation of measures to reduce environmental loads) (Alexander, 2004).

What's interesting about this is that the SDLC represents a project management methodology--replete with various project phases. Unfortunately, these phases don't necessarily match the process groups denoted in the PMBOK. Thus, project managers who are responsible for managing IT projects may find themselves smack in the middle of a communications breakdown: The IT folks are using “SDLC-speak.” the PMPs are using “PMP-speak” and, while the terms they each use often sound identical, they actually mean different things. Thus it's important for those who will be involved with IT to make sure that they understand this phenomenon so they can more effectively manage the communications.

Before carrying out an analysis, the boundaries of the operations that together produce the process or product have to be defined. This is important because if any part of the system contained within the boundaries is changed, all the other inputs and outputs will also change.

The relationship between the system life cycle, the software life cycle and system development cycle can be confusing (Beynon, 2009). The systems development cycle is, in fact, simply part of the system life cycle. Similarly the software development cycle is simply part of the system development cycle. The software life cycle is the same as system life cycle when the system being designed consists solely of software. Figure 1 shows the relationship between these various concepts (Beynon, 2009).

Life cycle analysis is only one of the names for this sort of analysis; it is also known as eco-balance, cradle-to-grave analysis, resource analysis, and environmental impact analysis. The main purpose of System Development Life Cycle is to identify where improvements can be made to reduce the environmental impact of a product or process in terms of energy and raw materials used and wastes produced. It can also be used to guide the development of new products (Blanchard, 2006).

It is important to distinguish between life cycle analysis and life cycle assessment. Analysis is the collection of the data - it produces an inventory; assessment goes one stage further and adds on an evaluation of the inventory. A System Development Life Cycle does not define or explain actual environmental effect (Cummings, 2006). For example, a System Development Life Cycle will tell us how many grams of limestone are used to make a bottle for mineral water and how much energy was used to extract it. But it does not tell us the environmental impact of this action, such as whether limestone is a scarce resource or whether its extraction ...