The Software Development Lifecycle – Part 1

Well, it was inevitable. My goal of posting at least weekly to this blog is being threatened. It’s been over a week since my last post so it’s time to pick it back up again.

This week at Click was certainly a busy one and it made me realize that it’s time for a refresher on our recommended Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). All software development follows a repeated cycle, sort of like the “Wet Hair, Lather, Rinse, Repeat” instructions on your shampoo bottle – simple, but effective. Generally speaking, software development follows  a simple cycle as well:

Define –> Design –> Implement –> Test –> Deploy –> Repeat

This is true no matter the technology or tools. Working with Click Commerce Extranet base solutions is no different. Putting the cycle into practice requires discipline, familiarity with the development tools, and an ability to troubleshoot problems when they arise. Over the next couple of posts, I’ll be describing the Click Research and Healthcare SDLC. Along the way, I’ll highlight common problems and how to address them. Hopefully this will lead us to a discussion on how best to handle the concurrent development of multiple solutions, which is the topic of a panel discussion I’ll be hosting at the upcoming C3 conference. So…let’s get started.

Three Environments
To effectively practice the SDLC, three environments are required:

1. Development
   This is where all active development takes place. Developers typically will work together in this environment, benefitting from and leveraging each other’s work. All work is formally versioned through the use of Source Control integration via a tool called Process Studio. We’ll be discussing the use of Process Studio in more detail a bit later. This is the only environment where development should place.
   
2. Staging (Test)
   This environment is ideally a mirror image the production environment and is used as a place to test completed development before it is deemed ready for production use. It also can serve as a warm standby environment just in case there are issues with the production site that can’t immediately be resolved.
   
3. Production
   This is the live system and the only site end users will use to perform their daily tasks.

Work performed in the development server is packaged up into what’s called a Configuration Update which can then be applied to Staging, where it is tested, and, if all the tests pass, to Production. For more information on what is included in a Configuration Update, check out the following Knowledgebase Article:

INFO: Understanding Configuration Updates in Click Commerce Extranet

Next time, we’ll talk about how configuration updates are built and special things to consider in order to make sure they can be correctly applied.