ZDLC for the Early Stages of the Software Development Life Cycle

The cost of fixing of a software defect in the later phases of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) is significantly more than fixing a defect in the earlier phases of the SDLC, especially for distributed systems. The Zero Deviation Life Cycle (ZDLC) has been engineered to ensure that there is minimum deviation from the requirements and there is as little defect injection as possible between the phases of the SDLC. So far the toolset developed for ZDLC do not include a comprehensive tool to automate the translation of Natural language requirements into design models for communication, process and data requirements. The aim of this paper is to establish the premise for such a tool, which could be added to the ZDLC suites of tools.