The systems development life cycle, in its variant forms, remains one of the oldest and yet still widely used methods of software development and acquisition methods in the information technology (IT) arena. While it has evolved over the years in response to ever-changing scenarios and paradigm shifts pertaining to the building or acquiring of software, its central tenants are as applicable today as they ever were. Life-cycle stages have gone through iterations of different names and number of steps, but at the core the SDLC is resilient in its tried-and-true deployment in business, industry, and government. In fact, the SDLC has been called one of the two dominant systems development methodologies today, along with prototyping (Piccoli, 2012). Thus, learning about the SDLC remains important to the students of today as well as tomorrow.
This paper describes the use of the SDLC in a real-world heath care setting involving a principle component of a regional hospital care facility. The paper can be used as a pedagogical tool in a systems analysis and design course, or in an upper-division or graduate course as a case study of the implementation of the SDLC in practice. First, a review of the SDLC is provided, followed by a description of the case study environment. Next, the application of the methodology is described in detail. Following, inferences and observations from the project are presented, along with lessons learned. Finally, the paper concludes with implications for the three areas of research, practice, and pedagogy, as well as suggestions for future research