An Overview of Systems Development

The core activities in systems development are system analysis, system design, programming, testing, conversion, and production and maintenance. Systems analysis is the study and analysis of problems of existing systems and the identification of requirements for their Figure 1. The systems development process solution. Requirements must consider economic, technical, and temporal constraints, as well as the goals, procedures, and decision processes of the organization. There are various systems-building alternatives: the traditional systems life cycle, prototyping, application software packages, end-user development, and outsourcing.