Toward a 3-Stage Software Development Lifecycle
Summary
For the past two decades, most organizations have used a five-stage software development lifecycle (SDLC) to give teams a way to ensure high quality and detect as many issues as possible before production. If you want to create extremely reliable, high quality software, it is going to be relatively slow; if you want to prioritize speed, you will inevitably have more change failures and resulting outages. But developers shouldn’t have to ship their code off to a testing environment to discover if it works or not and worry about the embarrassment of having a colleague find an error. Robust change validation does just that — it allows developers to spot potential errors before the application or update leaves the local environment. And when a change is validated, the developer can push the code into the production-like environment with confidence, knowing that it’s been tested against upstream and downstream dependencies and won’t cause anything to break unexpectedly.