Development Proces

My mental model for the modern software development process (MSDP)

NOTE: this does not cover:

- domain specific knowledge (eg. databases, security, scaling, etc)
- specific technologies used in app development (eg. databases, queues, infra)

Three Phases of MSDP

• there are three phases of MSDP
  • prepare: scope out tasks that need to be done
  • exceute: execute on the tasks that need to be done
  • release: deploy tasks done and maintain forever

End to End MSDP

• each phase of MSDP can be further divided into more granular steps

• prepare

  • plan: scoping out tasks
  • issue: creating and assigning tasks

• execute

  • code: writing code
  • qa: testing
  • commit: version control
  • review: review process
  • docs: internal and external docs, api docs

• release

  • deploy: deploying code to staging/production
  • operate: running a service after its been deployed: dashboard, monitoring
  • learn: a/b test, metrics, understand business impact
  • loopback: learnings, communicate changes upstream to start the cycle again

Source: this is heavily inspired by the gitlab master plan

NOTE: an alternative way of thinking about this is the following three roles

• product work
• qa work
• ops work

Increasingly, this is all done by a single person and encasulated in what I call the modern software development workflow (MSDW)

In the next section, we're going to go over each step in detail and go over some examples, challenges, and products in each space. Each section will have the following structure:

• requirements: what steps make up each particular step
• examples: concrete examples of each step in practice
• challenges: current challenges facing developers at each step
• solutions: what is available at each step

NOTE: this is not meant to be comprehensive but rather an 80/20 of showing big usecases