Software development can be a complicated process. Integrating creative ideas, stakeholder requirements, and expectations while deciding on the look and feel of applications can overwhelm even top-tier DevOps teams. For organizations with multiple software engineering teams, complexity in the software delivery process can lead to enormous delays.

To mitigate this issue, today’s DevOps teams follow a standard process known as the software development lifecycle (SDLC), which oversees the lifecycle of an application from the idea stage to production.

What Is the Software Development Lifecycle?

SDLC, also known as the DevOps cycle, is a systematic delivery workflow that engineering teams follow from software conception to full application. It makes rolling out features and software versions easier, reducing time to market for reliable software products. 

The SDLC process fosters collaboration among different departments to create software that incorporates various inputs. This, in turn, maximizes the quality of the final product. For DevOps teams, SDLC provides a clear roadmap and timeline for software production and prevents unclear and overlapping objectives.

Importantly, SDLC has distinct stages, with specific requirements that simplify the software development process. Here are those stages.

Planning

The planning stage is where goals, expectations, and outlines are established. 

The first step is requirements gathering, which entails working with different teams—including designers, engineers, and testers—to capture the desired outcomes. This, however, can result in numerous feature requests. Development teams must agree on which to prioritize and which features can come later. 

Planning tools such as Rally and Clarity PPM by Broadcom align your team with the project’s objectives. Rally supports capacity forecasting, while Clarity helps with strategic planning and making investment decisions.

A well-defined development and feature implementation plan serves as the roadmap to guide various developer teams, such as frontend, backend, testing, and DevOps teams. 

Analyzing

Once plans are in place,dev teams analyze the entire production process before writing any code. This means understanding the needs and expectations of users, as well as the constraints and assumptions of the project.

The analysis phase involves developers and testers working closely together to create test cases and validate requirements. Various tools such as Agile Requirements Designer, which offers features such as test case optimization, test design automation, and in-sprint testing, can help visualize the application’s requirements. 

Through meticulous requirements analysis and careful selection of the appropriate technologies, development teams can establish the environment necessary to create high-quality software products.

Designing

The design phase involves creating one or more designs, such as dioramas, flowcharts, sketches, site trees, HTML screen designs, and prototypes to achieve the desired project result. It aims to create a detailed visual and component-based plan to guide product development and ensure that the software remains effective and secure over time.

During this phase, user interface designs, database schemas, system interfaces, and prototypes are consolidated to provide a comprehensive preview of the overall development process. The output generated functions as input for the system development or build phase. 

Building

The build phase begins with the approved design, which details how to create the application. Developers establish a unified codebase, managed by version control systems (VCS), to ensure code uniformity and better collaboration.

Code policies are developed to ensure adherence to laid-out code standards and allow for automated code reviews. A continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) flow will prove invaluable for teams as they test, re-build, and release application features.

Testing

In the testing phase, the DevOps team scrutinizes the codebase to identify and address any potential bugs that can impact the application, especially when interacting with external data.

At this point, as the application has not been launched, tools like Test Data Manager by Bradcom replicate live data interactions. The simulated data covers various testing scenarios, helping developers analyze cases that may have been missed during the build phase.

Virtualizing the software application also allows testers to check how the product behaves in a controlled environment. Prominent tools such as Service Virtualization enable developers to simulate the application’s behavior.

The DevOps team can also conduct smoke tests, which involve running a minimal set of tests on each build to verify that the most critical functions of the software work as expected. The purpose of smoke testing is to quickly determine whether the deployed build is stable and ready for further, more in-depth testing.

Deploying

Once the DevOps team is content with code testing and application virtualization, they initiate the deployment process. Deployment industry standards provide a range of deployment environments, including the most common—development, testing, staging, and production environments.

Release Automation, a productivity tool designed to automate and standardize application releases from development to production, ensures predictability and compliance for deployments in both production and lower environments.

Monitoring

The application is now live and users are interacting with it—the perfect time to observe it and note its performance. Monitoring can reveal metrics that can affect the application’s behavior, such as response times, CPU usage, memory utilization, network latency, and other relevant performance indicators.

DX Application Performance Management (DX APM) provides performance insights and automates feedback. Designed to manage modern stacks, DX APM provides fast, precise insights crucial for optimizing performance in cloud-hosted applications, platforms, and systems.

Streamlining the SDLC Process for High-Quality Software

By providing a clear roadmap from conception to production, the software development lifecycle streamlines software delivery. Each stage of the cycle plays a pivotal role, addressing challenges like code conformity, automated code reviews, and performance monitoring. This minimizes time to market for reliable software products.

A&I Solutions, for over two decades now, has been delivering comprehensive IT solutions to global industry leaders. We partner with leading technology providers to offer top-notch solutions, helping clients achieve peak performance and maintain a leading position in their respective sectors.

Book a demo so you can experience for yourself how our solutions can help bring your applications to life.