What does the Software Development Life Cycle mean to me?
1. Requirements
Understand what and when
Rank features with high, medium, and low priority
Try to deliver in smaller phases to control schedule & quality risk
2. Technical Design
Identify "big rocks" that are key design points
Focus early prototyping and iterative design on key points
Pseudocode and diagrams and explanatory tables
Tell the story. Here is why the project is important (justification), what we are going to solve this with (end state), and how we are going to get there
Keep the design documentation up to date with overall solution or tricky details
Monitoring - how to determine system health post installation.
3. Unit Test Plan
Major design elements
Most code modules need a main test driver
Special cases
Volume testing sooner than later to allow correction
4. Implementation
Build realistic project tree for code and configuration
Scripts or automation tool to build and deploy
Use team common library as much as possible
Code and test
5. Management (project plan)
Procurement planning
Infrastructure build out planning
Test new infrastructure ASAP
Install new products ASAP
Install into test and production as early as possible to find configuration, security, and other surprises.
Try to not setup or fix by hand, do write scripts for repetitive tasks and perhaps to prototype before coding.
Use code not scripts for production tasks with integrated logging and error emailing.
Buy extended warranties and automatic upgrades if have 3rd party tools
Frequent team meetings
Make developers update the documentation with actual implementation
Knowledge sharing / cross training
6. Run Book / Contingency Plan
Project & infrastructure overview
What to do when ??? happens
Tips and tricks
7. Model Testing
If using a predictive data model, forward test new production data and results against the model's predicted results. This would apply to e.g. creating a stock market expert system (yes, every investor's Holy Grail). This more commonly would apply to monitoring actual production volume performance against initial projections and remaining capacity.
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