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Sample Software Development Process

This sample lifecycle presents a typical, simplified, software development process. The team that uses it consists of two developers, one quality assurance (QA) engineer, and one development manager. The software application being worked on is already in the market, so the purpose of this project is to support maintenance work on the current release of that software.

The five phases (states) in the development process are as follows:

1. Assign—Various personnel such as QA engineers, customer support personnel, and the development manager, create modification requests (packages). The development manager assigns a priority to each request and passes the request to the development team (promotes the request packages to the Coding state).
2. Coding—Developers determine what code must be modified. Using the packages, the developers check out the code to their respective client computers, make changes, and check in the code. When all code affected by the request is modified, the development manager approves the packages and promotes them to the Test state.
3. Test—The QA engineer reviews the requests and tests the code to verify that it works according to the requests. If errors are found in the code, the engineer returns the packages to the developers (demotes it to the Coding state). If no errors are found, the engineer promotes the packages to the Release state.
4. Release—Code that is ready to be released resides here. Packages are not demoted from this state. When the code is ready to be released a type of picture named a snapshot is taken of the code that is included in the release.
5. Snapshots—All snapshots reside here. Snapshots make it easy to go back and look at the content of any release.

More information:

Projects and Lifecycles

States and Views

Working Views and the Baseline

Processes

Package Movement Through the Lifecycle

Snapshot Views