Software and App Development

What is software & app development?

Software development refers to the design, documentation, programming, testing, and ongoing maintenance of a software deliverable. The combination of these steps are used to create a workflow pipeline, a sequence of steps that when followed produce high-quality software deliverables. This pipeline is known as the software development lifecycle.

While there are many nuances, the software development lifecycle generally includes common elements, as noted below.

Discover

Projects are envisioned, designed, and prioritized. A methodology such as agile helps to guide the work process for the project. Practices like DevOps guide practices during development and operations. Confluence is a great tool to develop product research documents and share design files during this stage.

Plan

Stakeholders are identified, budgets set, and infrastructure requisitioned. Design documents from the concept phase are broken down into actionable tasks. Jira Software and Trello manage, track, and organize these task lists.

Build and Test

Development teams work to build production-ready software that meets requirements and feedback. CI/CD pipelines ensure an efficient developer experience. Bitbucket offers collaborative code review tools and CI/CD pipelines that plugin to the code review process.

Deploy

With code written, tested, and merged, it’s time to ship it. Bitbucket’s CI/CD pipelines make deployments as easy as clicking a button. The live production code will need a place to live. Consider using cloud hosting provided by Amazon AWS, Google Cloud Platform, or Microsoft Azure.

Operate

Support and maintenance are required for active software projects. Jira Service Management provides powerful tools to capture, triage, and resolve customer support requests.

Observe

Incident management is when Development and Operations respond to unplanned events and restore services using reliable methods for prioritizing incidents and getting to resolution fast.

Not very long ago, the preferred method of building software applications was a monolithic architecture, which was as a single, autonomous unit. This approach worked well for many developers until applications increased in complexity. When a modification to a small section of code is made in a monolithic system, it requires rebuilding the entire system, running tests on the entire system, and deploying an entirely new version of the application.Then along came microservices, an approach that breaks down software systems into smaller units that are autonomously developed and deployed. The microservices architecture was driven by the DevOps movement that seeks to frequently deliver updates, like new features, bug fixes, and security improvements. It also became, in many instances, a path for businesses to rewrite legacy applications using modern programming languages and updates to a technology stack.

What are microservices?

A microservices architecture, also simply known as “microservices”, is an approach to building an application as a series of independently deployable services that are decentralized and autonomously developed. These services are loosely coupled, independently deployable, and easily maintainable. While a monolithic application is built as a single, indivisible unit, microservices break that unit down into a collection of independent units that contribute to the larger whole. Microservices are an integral part of DevOps, since they are the basis for continuous delivery practices that allow teams to adapt quickly to user requirements.