Software Development Life Cycle Tools: Top 27 Must-Have

It’s always harder for development companies to organize the design process so that everything works as intended. Lack of experience and resources, both human and material, can have a detrimental effect on the productivity of work and quality of the final product.

In this article, we are about to discuss the entity of software development life cycle tools, which types of  SDLC tools are given the best result, and provide the examples of most-used and most-effective tools that will enhance your development process and bring it to the brand-new level of productiveness.

What the SDLC Tools Are Used For?

During the development process, any team has to face with different faces, such as coding, testing, documentation forming, and many others, including managing all of them into a structured system, clear for each participant.

As an experienced team, we used to use many different tools to regulate and manage the complicated and plurilateral software development life cycle phases, so we collected all the possible types of helping services and programs with the particular examples. It doesn’t matter what methodologies or techniques you as a team will use to implement SDLC in your dev cycle, surely these top SDLC tools will simultaneously simplify and strengthen your dev processes.

Leading Types of Software Development Life Cycle Tools with the Must-Have Examples

We carefully picked and conveniently arranged for you the best of all the SDLC tools for each phase of development that your team can face with during the case creation, no matter the development models you have picked. Each of tools have its own benefits and pitfalls, so please, study them hard before using in your dev process.

SDLC Management Tools

Getting your teams to generate high-quality software at a reasonable cost and in a short period of time might be difficult. However, your development teams may produce software more rapidly, effectively, and consistently with the aid of SDLC management tools. These resources help PMs to give the instructions and standards of development to the whole team, provide the communication functions and control the task allocation. They will also provide you hard statistics so you can demonstrate to executives and customers what your staff are accomplishing.

Project Management Tools

The critical type of tools that are required for any project. They ensure maximum structuring of the team’s work. To see this, you can read about one of our latest projects - Pastry Shop & Delivery Management Ecosystem, which would be impossible without the complex SDLC tools and their skilled use. Project SDLC management tools help to simplify planning, assign tasks within the team and track their status. Here are the most common PM tools on the market:

Jira
Especially designed for Agile project management. Offers customizable Scrum boards, Kanban boards and flexible reports. Jira also supports integration with development tools such as Bitbucket or GitHub, which allows you to link tasks to specific comms.

Pros:

• High scalability.
• Large number of plugins and integrations.
• Suitable for large teams and projects.

Cons:

• Difficulty of configuration for beginners.
• Relatively high cost.

Trello
Trello allowing organizing tasks visually with cards. Each card can contain a checklist, completion dates, attachments and comments.

Pros:

• Easy to learn.
• Free basic plan.
• Support for Power-Ups to extend functionality.

Cons:

• Limited capabilities for large teams.
• Not ideal for complex processes.

ClickUp
Universal tool for managing projects, tasks, time, resources and documents. Suitable for small companies that want to bring everything together in one platform. Has a powerful automation system.

Pros:

• Convenience of combining all processes in one place.
• Integration with multiple services.
• Suitable for teams of any size.

Cons:

• May seem overloaded for small teams.

Microsoft Project
Classic solution for managing complex projects, especially in a corporate environment. Suitable for Gantt diagrams, critical path analysis and resource management.

Pros:

• Ideal for traditional project management methodologies (Waterfall).
• Reliability and accuracy in calculations.

Cons:

• High license cost.
• Cool learning curve.

Monday.com
Platform with flexible templates for planning and managing tasks. Suitable for all kinds of work: software development, marketing campaigns, sales management. Custom boards, task automation and integration with other services.

Pros:

• Simple interface.
• Suitable for small and medium teams.

Cons:

• Limitations of the free version.
• Not ideal for complex agile processes.

Requirements Management Tools

These tools are providing the gathering, analyzing, documenting and tracking changes in technical and usability requirements at all stages of the SDLC.

Confluence
Designed for documentation and collaboration. It integrates well with Jira, allowing you to link documents to specific tasks. Supports templates for creating specifications, requirements and reports.

Pros:

• Easy search and organization of information.
• Support for co-editing.

Cons:

• Limited formatting functionality.

   

IBM Engineering Requirements Management (DOORS)
Used in complex projects with high volume requirements, for example, in aerospace or automotive industry. Supports strict processes of verification and audit.

Pros:

• Suitable for critical projects.
• Advanced audit functions.

Cons:

• High cost.
• Requires training for work.

ReqView
Simple and lightweight solution for managing requirements. Suitable for small and medium projects. Allows you to import data from Word and Excel, which is convenient for the initial design phase.

Pros:

• Easy to use documents.
• Simplicity for small projects.

Cons:

• Limited functionality for complex processes.

Communication And Collaborative Tools

These platforms help teams to interact effectively, even if they are located in different parts of the world.

Slack
Integration with Jira, GitHub, Jenkins and other systems makes Slack convenient for developers. There are channels, notifications and the ability to create automatic bots.

Pros:

• Ease of use.
• High degree of customization.

Cons:

• Message history restrictions in free version.

Microsoft Teams
Supports group chat, video calls and task management. Great for integration with Office 365 (Word, Excel, PowerPoint).

Pros:

• Suitable for corporate users.
• Convenient for working with documents.

Cons:

• Can be difficult for users unfamiliar with Microsoft products.

Zoom
A leader in videoconferencing. Suitable for discussing complex issues and giving presentations. Has the ability to record meetings and use virtual boards for notes.

Pros:

• High quality of communication.
• Ease of use.

Cons:

• Limit of the free version to the duration of meetings.

   

Coding Tools

This type of software development life cycle tools can be used regardless of the chosen SDLC phases, as soon as coding is the core part of any development. They help optimize the processes of software creation, testing, debugging and deployment. Also, these SDLC tools provide code-teamwork support, version management and build automation.

GitHub
The most popular platform for code hosting. Offers CI/CD Actions, convenient code revision tools and integration with hundreds of other services.

Pros:

• Easy to use repositories.
• Great documentation and community.

Cons:

• Some features are only available in paid plans.

GitLab
A more complex tool, including DevOps-functions "out of the box". Allows you to manage repositories, perform automatic tests, deploy and monitor.

Pros:

• All in one instrument.
• Local hosting for data control.

Cons:

• More sophisticated interface compared to GitHub.

Visual Studio Code (VS Code)
Easy and powerful editor for code. Supports plugins for languages, CI/CD tools, formatting and debugging.

Pros:

• Free and high performance.
• Great community and active development.

Cons:

• Does not include built-in tools for complex CI/CD.

   

Docker
Resolves the "it only works on my computer" issue. Makes it easier to create containers that include the application and all its dependencies.

Pros:

• Easy to create and manage containers.
• Broad support for DevOps.

Cons:

• Requires skills to configure the infrastructure.

   

SDLC Testing Tools

Testing your software is as important as its coding. To make this process easier (and faster), feel free to use various SDLC testing tools. But remember - both automated and manual testing tools are important to ensure the quality of the software.

Selenium
Leader in the field of automated testing of web applications. Allows you to create scripts in Python, Java, C#, Ruby and other languages.

Pros:

• Free and open source.
• Support for various browsers.

Cons:

• Requires programming skills.
• Complexity of setting up the environment.

Postman
Popular tool for API testing. Supports automated test creation, query collection and documentation generation.

Pros:

• Intuitive interface.
• Free basic functionality.

Cons:

• Free version limitations when working with large query collections.

TestRail
Test management system. Helps document testing scenarios, track their progress and link them to tasks from Jira.

Pros:

• Great for systematic testing.
• Convenient progress reports.

Cons:

• Expensive license.
• The difficulty of learning for beginners.

Katalon Studio
Universal solution for testing web, mobile and desktop applications. Integrates with CI/CD platforms.

Pros:

• Convenience for novice users.
• Rich documentation and support.

Cons:

• Limitations in the free version.

   

DevOps and Automation Tools

SDLC automation tools might be useful if your engineers are annoyed by their code being stuck all the time. You may increase communication within your engineering organization, enhance CM/CI/CD, minimize the delivery cycle, release, and recovery times, and bust team productivity and efficiency. DevOps approaches, which emphasize automation throughout the iterative stages of continuous merge, continuous integration, continuous deployment, and continuous delivery, will better suit your organization in this way.

Jenkins
Popular CI/CD tool. Supports many plugins for integration with other systems. Flexibility in the configuration of the plugins.

Pros:

• Free and powerful ecosystem.
• Suitable for any size projects.

Cons:

• Takes time to set up and maintain.
• Can be overloaded for small projects.

CircleCI
Easy to use, quick to configure. Suitable for small and medium teams. Automation of CI/CD with quick plugin setup. Support for "out of box" Docker containers. Available to be integrated in GitHub, Bitbucket and other platforms.

Pros:

• Easy to configure and use.
• High speed of execution of the pictures.

Cons:

• More expensive for large teams than Jenkins.

   

Ansible
Tool for configuration management and automation of tasks such as server deployment, software configuration, infrastructure management. Uses YAML to describe processes.

Pros:

• Easy to use.
• Does not require client installation on managed nodes.

Cons:

• Limited monitoring of execution processes.

   

Terraform
Tool for describing and managing infrastructure as code. Supports multi-cloud environments (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud). Ability to control version of infrastructure.

Pros:

• Convenient for scalable projects.
• Reduced the probability of errors during deployment.

Cons:

• Requires training for novice users.

   

Monitoring and Support Tools

Monitoring and support software development life cycle tools are an important part of software management, especially in the deployment and operation phases. They help development teams, DevOps and system administrators to monitor systems status, prevent failures and respond quickly to incidents.

New Relic
Provides application performance monitoring, including transaction tracking, request analysis and bottleneck detection.

Pros:

• Easy to understand reports and data visualization.

Cons:

• Can be expensive for large teams.

   

Splunk
Used to analyze logs and events in real time. Suitable for detecting incidents and conducting investigations.

Pros:

• High performance on big data.
• Enhanced options for creating dashboards.

Cons:

• Complexity of configuration.
• High cost of licenses.

Prometheus + Grafana
Prometheus collects metrics, and Grafana provides powerful visualization tools. Ideal for monitoring infrastructure and applications.

Pros:

• Free and open source.
• Large community and plenty of ready integrations.

Cons:

• Requires self-configuration and maintenance.

   

Sentry
Allows you to monitor errors in real time. Reports problems related to a specific user, device or application version.

Pros:

• Ease of integration.
• Convenient visualization of errors and traces.

Cons:

• Limit on number of events in free version.

Summing Up

Modern software development projects are becoming more and more complex, requiring from the teams fast adaptation, high quality of product and minimal time costs. Tools applied at different stages of the development life cycle (or SDLC) are key to achieving these goals.

SDLC tools provide a comprehensive approach to software development management, from planning to operation. Their shared use:

• Accelerates the creation of a quality product.
• Increases the productivity of the teams.
• Reduces the cost of error correction.
• Makes the project more predictable and scalable.

In today’s environment, it is impossible to manage development effectively without using tools for each SDLC stage. The selection of the appropriate tools not only simplifies the work of the team, but also ensures a high level of satisfaction of customers, users and all stakeholders.

Contact Celadonsoft to create your own tooling pool and to create a unique development experience that is customized to your exact project idea.