What is SDLC? And how do release management platforms like dyrector.io fit into the lifecycle?

Software development lifecycle is the process that enables high quality software to be produced both cost and time efficiently. It’s a set of steps organizations involved in software development can follow to maintain quality assurance aspects to avoid pitfalls that can occur after deployment by focusing their efforts on testing during the development phase.

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SDLC isn’t a finite process. In this article we’ll address how your team can benefit from implementing SDLC practices and also how the dyrector.io release management platform can support your deployment and maintenance efforts.

#1: Planning

The first phase of the software development lifecycle is planning. At this stage business aspects of the software are assembled. The purpose of this is to record the business purpose of the software, so your team can serve it better during the requirement analysis and development steps. At this time, the conversations between the client and your organization revolve around the following questions.

• Who’s going to use the software?

• How will the software be used?

• What kind of information will the software use?

The result of planning is a concrete specification of requirements – which isn’t the software requirement specification just yet! – the software needs to deliver. These are usually the demands of the client, the end-user and the functional requirements of the software itself.

#2: Requirement Analysis

Once the requisites are defined, your organization’s team can begin to analyze them. The requirement analysis stage is extremely important, therefore every stakeholder within your organization needs to be present from developers to testers and marketers. The point of this stage is to get your teammates to understand the purpose of the software and its functionalities.

During requirement analysis the requirements set at the planning phase are addressed technically, and also the foreseeable risks are defined so your team can prepare for them. The result of this stage is a software requirement specification, or SRS document, which is the basis of the following phases of SDLC.

#3: Design

After the needs of each stakeholder (client, end-user) and the software requirements are established, it’s time to design how those requisites will be fulfilled. If the software is the building, the design phase is where the blueprint’s being made.

With the leadership of senior team members, the architecture of the software is finalized by selecting the most optimal plan to create the software. During this phase the team members bear in mind the SRS document, as well as the maintenance responsibilities once the software is deployed to avoid risks.

#4: Development

After the architecture of the software is finalized, the implementation stage is where the operative work is taking place. The developers start to develop the software, the designers begin to work on the user interface.

In the meantime, as soon as a portion of the product is ready for testing, the testers begin to give feedback about the functionality and usability of the software to the developers and the designers. Continuous testing is a staple of delivering a product that’s efficient and provides great user experience, as well as serving the business purposes of the software.

#5: Implementation

Imagine the SDLC as a Hollywood production’s workflow. The design and the development phases are when everything you see on the screen – the actors, the costumes, and so on – is being made. The implementation phase is where you set the scenery before the shooting begins.

After your software goes through thorough quality assurance processes and is approved by your customer, it’s ready to be deployed to the hardware it’s going to run. This is the stage of implementation, where the software gets installed to the servers and domain structures are defined.

If you’re working with robust applications that have different versions, deployment can be a complicated, lengthy process that requires the presence of technical personnel. Ask any developer if they’d rather manage deployments or develop actual software. They’d not let you finish the question before telling you they’d obviously develop instead. We know it because we’re software developers, too.

This is when dyrector.io enters the scene and the crowd goes crazy in the screening room.

Release management platforms like dyrector.io make it as easy as a finger snap to manage the deployment of various versions of the same product to your clients’ cloud environment or on-prem server. All you need is the version number of your product. After entering the selected version, you can start the deployment. The platform’s dashboard makes it easy to monitor the process, giving you instant feedback.

#6: Operation and maintenance

After deployment, the end-users can finally access the application and use its functions. At this stage, the performance of the software is being monitored – continuously, by DevOps approach. This gives constant feedback on errors and emerging problems in the software’s functionality, and also to scale the environment to serve the workload generated by users.

For operation and maintenance purposes, dyrector.io does an encore appearance when you need to see which version is being used on your client’s server.

Summary

After going through all these steps, you can go back to Step #1 – planning – to develop and deploy new functions into your software based on user activity by utilizing the SDLC. Bear in mind that while SDLC has a strict hierarchy of steps, you can customize them to your organization’s needs and resources.

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This blogpost was written by the team of dyrector.io. dyrector.io is an open-source continuous delivery & deployment platform with version management.

Find the project on GitHub.