The Mysterious Gears behind your Software Development Lifecycle

Before we begin, I assume that some people would come here to take their first steps into the world of Software Development. While you were researching what you need for building your first golden goose of an app, you came across the term Software Development Lifecycle or SDLC.

Let me break it down for you, as in Physics, terminology in software development is often right on the nose. For example, a Blackhole is literally a “Black” hole, a Neutron Star is made of highly condensed Neutrons, etc. Similarly, the Software Development Lifecycle is literally the different stages your software goes through from its ill-fated conception to its untimely deployment (puns intended).

Keeping up with the metaphor of an unwanted child, your software development works in similar stages: -

1) Planning – Ironically, the life of your (unwanted child) software development starts with planning all the following stages. It's much like figuring out how your 1-day old baby will pay for its college loan down the line. It's often inaccurate and doesn’t account for your child’s propensity to drop out of high school and become a rock star.

2) Development – This stage is the mother of all future trauma. It can be very enjoyable watching your newborn go through teething, scaping knees, underage drinking, and finally becoming big enough to go out into the world as a bright-eyed member of society. But this stage can also end up giving you a punk-haired Emo who goes around breaking the law because you didn’t give it enough attention.

3) Testing – The stage your software gets figuratively punched in the gut by the experiences of growing up. It can be painful, but if you did your job right, not that bad and might even help shine your diamond in the rough.

4) Deployment – It's finally time, your child is all grown up, lived a life, got shaped by society, and had no kids because all software is inherently sterile. It's never the right time, and you don’t want to let go, but when the grim reaper (your client) comes calling, you can never say no.

5) Monitoring/Iteration – Did I say your software is like a child? Well, unfortunately, it’s time to step outside of the metaphor, because, it’s not. Unwanted or not, for most of us, the software development lifecycle is a never-ending cycle of reincarnation, where your deployed software is but the beginning of the next iteration when you start from stage 1 with new requirements.

This is not to say that there are only 5 stages, some say it's 4 others say it’s 7. But more or less they all boil down to adding an appendage or two to the ones mentioned above.

Dear reader, you might be wondering, ”All this forced analogy is all well and good, but how exactly should I go about making the Software Development Lifecycle for my software?”. Well, I have good news and bad news. The good news is that there are simply uncountable(figuratively) tools out there built specifically to make your SDLC easier. The bad news is that there are SIMPLY UNCOUNTABLE (figuratively) tools out there built specifically to make your SDLC easier.

It's like a minefield of Legos. You have dozens of Project Management tools that are meant to help you with planning, task allocation, and monitoring of progress. Dozens of IDEs and version control software to aid in your development. Dozens of Testing tools, both for automation and manual testing. And, you guessed it, Dozens of tools to help you with Deployments. Apart from all this, you have dozens of tools helping you bring all of this together in the form of Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment Pipelines (CICD).

For our math geniuses out there, that gives you a Dozens^5 combination of tools you can be using. But not all combinations are fiscally or practically useful. Select the wrong one, and you might be drinking from the poisoned cup with the ghost of an old knight telling you “You chose poorly” before you drop into bankruptcy (For those who went “HUH?”, look up Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade).

Okay fine, it probably won't be that severe for you, I was being overly dramatic just to drive the point home.

The point is, that implementing an effective SLDC is a major task, it takes a lot of patience to set up, but is almost always worth it.

The setup of a successful SDLC

As mentioned above, An SDLC has 5 stages, and each of those stages can be as extensive or as minimal as you so choose.

Let's take a use case, to make understanding this easier. Imagine you are the manager of the company “iRule” that makes applications for helping Kings and Queens manage their kingdom better.

You receive an order from the Queen of Hearts to make an application that can organize their royal treasury and keep accounts of incoming and outgoing treasures. They tell you that this product needs to have everything, automatic calculation of taxes including which peasant has over or underpaid, incoming and outgoing gifts, a registry of users that have permissions to enter the treasury, etc, on top of all that, a kickass UI/UX. And of course, you have to do a good job, or it’s “Off with your heads!”

Planning

You sit down with your team and try to evaluate the terms and requirements of this product. You need to figure out all the minutia, including how much time and labour it will take to make this, which features are the most important, what will be the user flow, and finalize the high-level architecture for your product. You then go back to the Queen to take her feedback and account for any changes requested by her.

You declare this stage of your SDLC is complete, and decide to move on to the next stage.

This use case paints a very rosy picture, despite the constant threat of beheading. In reality, the planning stage is full of pitfalls.

If these problems are not handled properly, while you might not lose your head, you will lose the client’s trust along with your time and money.

So, what can you do?

It is impossible to put the onus on your client. You could try and set up conditions that any additional features after the first set of requirements will be on a charge basis, or try to have extensive planning meetings with your client repeatedly to ensure the first-time-right scenario. By the end of the day, neither of those two options is really in your control.

There is one other option, that is in your control – Make sure that the Product and stakeholder information is properly recorded, transparent, and accessible to your entire organization. This helps all your teams to be on the same page while being aware of the bigger picture.

Development

So, you at ‘iRule’ managed to step over the pitfalls of Planning and finally decided to start development.

You had decided that you need a team of backend developers, frontend developers, UI/UX developers, etc. to develop the Minimal Viable Product within 1 month. You searched far and wide, recruiting the greatest masters from around the world, and rounded up the greatest teams ever seen.

You wonder, each team knows their assignment, they are masters of their trade, and the requirements are as clear as day. So, what in heavens could go wrong?

These problems are universal, no matter if your team is full of amateurs or masters, it’s a human condition. If you fail to keep these in check, the next stage will make you wish you had been beheaded in the first place.

So, what can you do?

Some of these issues just need a sterner hand. Enforcing that your team writes unit tests and reviews each other code on every change might just be the miracle drug your code needs.

While many Project Management tools help keep track of work allocation and task assignments, they are not a one-stop solution. You can still end up allocating duplicate tasks if you aren’t careful, and it definitely will require regular manual inputs from you and your teams.

Testing

If Development is the heart of your SDLC, Testing is the soul. In the same way, Emotional Damage makes you a better person, in the long run, running your software through extensive testing suites (Testing Damage) makes your software a better person in the long run. And you, at “iRule”, pride yourself on always keeping your employees and software as emotionally and mentally damaged as possible!

Testing usually follows the motto – “you shall not pass!”. And your testing teams work day and night and extensively test everything the development team throws at them. Every vulnerability, edge case, and input are meticulously checked.

But along the way, you start to see some troubles brewing on the horizon. Your testing starts to slow down. Bugs keep evading all your testing efforts, and soon your development speed starts to be impacted. Code keeps getting sent back for fixes, and it almost feels like you are building a house of cards that will collapse at the slightest gust of wind.

So, what happened to your perfect plan?

Testing is one of the most important factors that decide the quality of your software. A broken link might not send you to the gallows, but what if a bug causes all the details of the treasury to be leaked?

So, what can you do?

Almost every problem faced by the testing team can technically be divided into two sections:

1) Lack of communication between teams: Adding simple communication channels like Microsoft Teams and Slack might not be enough to bridge this gap if the information itself is too complicated to explain, or if the teams don’t know whom to talk to. Your SDLC needs to have owners at each level, and channels that can directly pinpoint the problematic area.

2) Lack of Automation: While not everything can be automated, creating automated tests for everything that can, is an amazing way to mitigate most problems. But as mentioned above, setting up and maintaining your automation can be very taxing due to the sheer number of tools you need to use. This is where your CI/CD Pipelines come into play. Its main purpose is to help you automate your testing and deployments.

Deployment

It's finally time, your first version is ready to be sent over to the Queen. She looks impatient and holds a bag of gold coins in one hand and a sharpened ax in the other.

You feel confident that your software is the best of the best. As you walk up to the podium, all eyes are on you and you think to yourself, “Nothing can go wrong today!”. Suddenly your phone starts to vibrate, but you ignore it and keep walking with a smile on your face. As you approach the mic, with a smile on your face, your phone doesn’t stop ringing. All eyes are on you, you cant have a look right now, so you start talking. Everyone hangs on your every word as you go about your presentation, and the queen slowly starts to loosen her hand on her ax. Your eyes brighten at the sight, and the moment has finally come to show your demo. Your phone hasn’t stopped vibrating for a second.

You type out the address of your web application, and press enter. The loading icon starts to rotate. It goes round and round, just round and round. Everyone is starting in anticipation, but all they see is the loading icon going round and round. Your smile slowly starts to fade, but a twinkling of hope is still there, it’ll come, and everything was perfectly built.

You look away, knowing that it might be slow internet or just a delay in some server response, but it will come. Suddenly the room gasps, and you swiftly turn back. Oh no, your eyes widen, your stomachs in a pit. The queen drops the bag of gold and tightens her grip on the ax.

Your worst nightmare has come true –

404, RESOURCE NOT FOUND!!!

You hurriedly look at your phone and see a hundred messages and dozens of missed calls from your product manager. All you hear is “OFF WITH HIS HEAD!!!” and all you wonder is “What went wrong?”

Deployment is the whole reason your software exists. If you fail to deliver, your beheading is justified.

So, what can you do?

The same rules apply here as with testing. You need proper communication channels, ownership of tasks, and automation.

Deployment automation has a major advantage over manual simply because of how consistent it can be. Every version, every patch, for every iteration, will always be released the same way consistently, and without any human error.

Monitoring/Iteration

Well since iRule is now dead, we can't keep using them as a reference. Oh well, such is life.

In reality, the first deployment is rarely the end of the story. It usually is a pre-cursor to feedback from the client that gets sent back as requirements to the first stage. Alternatively, many companies follow the iterative approach which means that this first deployment might just be a Minimum Viable Product. For them and most probably for you, the next step would simply be to pick up the next set of functionalities scheduled in the planning and start their development.

And then …

Dear Reader, this hyper-dramatic article may seem too unrealistic to you. And you might feel iRule reminds you of King Joffrey, i.e. so unrelatable that you feel like punching them in the face. But frankly, the story of iRule is just an adaptation of what happens to hundreds of software companies every year.

Lost orders, unhappy customers, and buggy software is a par-for-course for many. And it's not too complicated to understand why it's hard to actually implement the solutions mentioned above.

Does any of this sound familiar?

“We have tried using all the various tools for our Project Management, Development, Various Testing and Deployment Automations, and CICD, but it's soo time consuming, and takes soo long to implement and integrate.”

“We do basic testing to ensure code sanity, but we have no resources to implement automation and extensive testing.”

“The tools available are not intuitive or informative enough, so we don’t find the need to use them.”

“We mostly use combinations of free or open-source software, although it takes a long time to implement due to lack of expertise and maintaining it is a full-time job, at least it's free!!”

All I can say is that you are not alone. These aren’t situations that I have pulled out from nowhere, they are a culmination of my personal experience, and our extensive interviews and talks with professionals in the field.

In fact, it was these conversations, that motivated us to bring our solution KaizIQ to life.

It's time for a shameless plug.

Does your SDLC make you frown, well it's time to turn it upside-down. Bringing you KaizIQ, a framework that automates and simplifies your SDLC. Built to create and customize the SDLC that is right for you. It gives you a simple Project Management Tool that directly integrates with a Framework to automate your CICD. It has dashboards, it has Kanban Boards, It has In-house Testing and deployment automation tools, and the best of all, it’s all part of a single package!

Manage your teams, allocate work, and monitor progress all the way from the Project down to every single test, all from the comfort of your home(page). Do you have multiple Microservices? We can handle it. Do you have specific deployment requirements? We can handle it. Does your software have different versions that go to different clients? You guessed it; we can handle it!!

Call us now (email please) and get your ticket to be a beta tester today!!!

Alright, cringe over. Thanks for sticking till the end!

Signing Off!

Author: Akash Mehta, Co-Founder, Apice Tech