• Software Development Life Cycle
• Cover Letters
• Resume

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.