The product life cycle (PLC) represents an industry-accepted set of stages for the development of a new product. There are seven stages in the PLC:
Analysis
Design
Development
Testing
Implementation
Maintenance
End-of-life (EOL).
Analysis Stage
Analysis is the process of investigating a problem that you want to solve with your product. There are various tasks in this stage.
One of the tasks involves clearly defining the problem you want to solve, the market niche you want to fill, or the system you want to create and setting the scope of the project.
Another task involves identifying the key sub components that compose your overall product.
Good analysis of the problem leads to a good design of the solution and to decreased development and testing time.
Design Stage
Design is the process of applying the findings you made during the analysis stage to the actual design of your product. During the design stage, the primary task is to develop blueprints or specifications for the product or components in your system.
Development Stage
Development consists of using the blueprints created during the design stage to create actual components.
Testing Stage
In the testing stage you need to ensure that the developed product and its individual components meet the specification requirements created during the design stage.<BR><BR>Testing is usually performed by an external team. The team includes people other than those who actually developed the product. The main objective of the testing team is to ensure that the product is tested without any bias on behalf of the developer.
Implementation Stage
In the implementation stage, the product is made available to the customers. In other words, implementation refers to shipping a product so that the customers can purchase it.
The implementation stage is often referred to as the first customer ship or FCS in the computer industry.
Maintenance Stage
The maintenance stage consists of fixing problems with the product and rereleasing the product as a new version or revision.
EOL Stage
While the PLC does not have a separate stage for the start of a concept or project, it does have a stage for the end of a project.
EOL consists of carrying out all of the necessary tasks to ensure that the customers and employees are aware that a product is no longer being sold and supported and that a new product is available.
Why Should You Follow the PLC?
The PLC is an important part of product development because:
it helps ensure that products are created and delivered in time so that the time-to-market is reduced
the quality of a product is high
the return on investment is maximized
Developers who do not follow the PLC often encounter problems with their products that are costly to fix and could have been avoided.
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