This course provides an opportunity to learn issues involved in Software Development Life Cycles and Software Process Improvement and give the participants an overview of both concepts. The course will begin with the fundamentals of Software Development Life Cycles and basic concepts associated with Software Development. Both traditional and agile development techniques will be presented to introduce the participants to professional software development. In the second part of the course, we'll introduce the concept of Software Process Improvement and work on the fundamentals of the CMMI and XP (eXtreme Programming) practices.