Nobody codes an app on day one — there are six steps before it

A college principal wants software to track which section needs extra classes. A confident student opens a laptop and starts typing code the same afternoon. Six months later, the software is “done” — and completely useless, because nobody asked what the principal actually needed.

A system is a combination of related components that interact to perform some specific task. Building one that actually works needs an organized way of doing it — that organized way is the System Development Life Cycle, or SDLC.