Getting Started with the Software Development Lifecycle

I'm not a diva of SDLC, but I've spent enough time there to know how chaotic things can become and how essential a structured process is to delivering desired products.

To keep this post short and digestible, I will focus on answering just one question: What is SDLC?

What is SDLC?

The software development lifecycle (SDLC) is the process of developing software from ideation to a working product that users experience. This process helps organizations organize the steps or iterations until the product retires. Eventually, enhancing SDLC allows companies to be time-efficient while still delivering high-quality products to customers.

As you can imagine, developing a software product is rarely straightforward and often consists of too many activities. That's why we break down the complexities of the software development process into multiple categorized phases, which are usually structured. Then, we break down these phases into multiple activities and tasks.

If an activity is too complex, like managing releases or prioritizing the backlog, we often create sub-processes to manage it effectively. In the following posts, I'll explain more about sub-processes, activity, and task relations.

Overview of Phases and Activities of SDLC

SDLC consists of phases such as Management, Specification, Design, Implementation, Deployment, Verification, Validation, and Maintenance. Each phase groups similar activities. For example, gathering requirements fall under the Requirements Analysis phase, while writing tests and performing User Acceptance Testing (UAT) are part of the Testing phase.

Companies may divide the SDLC process into various phases, changing their requirements. There is no strict recipe; we organize, test, and then reorganize SDLC continuously.

Based on my experience working across various teams and conducting investigations, I imagine these 8 phases to be effective for grouping software development activities and managing their complexities.

Here's a breakdown of the 8 phases and the key activities within each.

• Management Phase: Process creation, process improvement, setting standards, change management, risk management, release planning, sprint planning, conducting evaluations, and making estimations.
• Specification Phase: Identifying needs, benchmarking industry, eliciting requirements, visualizing requirements, conducting gap analysis, conducting feasibility analysis, prioritizing requirements, conducting regulatory and compliance analysis, and holding stakeholder workshops like analysis refinement meetings.
• Design & Implementation: Creating architectural design, database design, interface design, security design, prototypes, executable code, integrating functionality, and documentation.
• Deployment: Preparing the deployment environment, configuring deployment pipelines and automating processes (CI/CD), deploying code to staging and production environments, rolling back versions when necessary, and monitoring post-deployment performance, including server and application health checks, managing documentation and providing training for stakeholders on new releases.
• Validation: Defining test methods, creating tests, executing tests, reporting measurements, obtaining user and customer approval
• Verification: conducting meetings like Retrospectives, Requirements Technical Reviews, Software Technical Reviews, Software Walkthroughs, Learn from Bugs
• UX: Conducting user research and usability testing, creating information architecture, visual design, and prototypes, as well as calculating and monitoring UX metrics like NPS.
• Maintenance: monitoring system performance and uptime to ensure continuous availability; performing regular system updates, patches, and upgrades; identifying and fixing bugs or issues reported by users or monitoring systems; handling customer or user support requests and resolving incidents; managing technical debt and refactoring code for improved performance and maintainability, continuously improving security through vulnerability assessments and applying security patches, scheduling and executing preventive maintenance to minimize future issues.

Note that even though validation and verification words have the same meaning in Turkish, they have different meanings in product development. In summary;

• Validation: Are we building the right product? Does our development meet the user's needs? Does our development solve the user's pain point?
• Verification: Are we building the product right? Are our quality standards enough? Do we have a sustainable process or infrastructure? Are we using the right technology?

It's important to note that while these phases are typical, SDLC is not a one-size-fits-all approach; it depends on many things, such as an organization's targets, resources, the stage in the product lifecycle, customer needs, industry-specific requirements, methodologies the organization is using, or even its culture.

We sometimes use methodologies like Scrum, approaches like Product-Led Growth and frameworks like MOSCOW to shape our processes and activities, but I will mention these in the following posts.

From my own experience, what matters and is required to make SDLC work for an organization is flexibility, continuous iteration and improvement, and effective change management. Of course, these are possible with effective and inclusive collaboration across multi-functioning teams.