Engineering SDLC practices you would like to adopt

Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) is the process of developing software through a series of stages from conception to delivery. In other words, SDLC is the lifecycle of any requirement from the time it has been initiated until it will be deployed in production.

In order to create productive team and efficient SDLC process there are couple of best practices you should consider adding to your SDLC in order to improve your engineering team execution, deliver faster and with higher quality:

1. Use Agile: Agile development methodologies, in most of the cases ensure faster delivery of software by breaking the development process into smaller chunks and continuously iterating them into the product.In addition these smaller chunks will reduce the risk of having too many chances getting into your production all at once
2. Do ongoing prioritization for both features and tech debt: This will help you to make sure that the development team will work on the most important features first. IN addition, prioritize technical debt, security fixes and customer issues into your backlog as well and allocate dedicated time for them in each sprint
3. Automate your testing: Test automation will help catching bugs in the early stage, improve the reliability of the product and reduce the number of production issues as well as  customers’ escalations. Automation tests can be added in many levels, starting from unit tests trough integration tests and all the way to E2E tests
4. Use version control: Although these days most of the companies use version control, it is still worth mentioning it in this list. version control tools will track all the code changes done by the teams and will allow you to easily track changes
5. Perform code review: Code reviews allow team members to review and give feedback on each other’s code, this simple practice will improve the overall quality of the software as well as keep the knowledge among more people.
6. Use project management tools: Project management tools, such as JIRA, became the source of truth for all engineering activities. It allows teams to track the progress of the development process and identify any potential roadblocks.
7. Let the tools’ workflows force your internal processes: It is crucial to know that once a new requirement gets into your project management tool it will be released only after it passes all the development stages, quality gates and meet the definition of done. Invest time in well defining this workflow so your tools will start working for you
8. Encourage learning and development: Encourage team members to continuously learn and improve their skills to ensure that the team is using the best practices and technologies. Follow the market trends and learn from other people experience 
9. Slow rollout of changes: This practice will reduce the risk of exposing all the customers at once to the new changes and will give you the option to roll back if necessary.There are a couple of different approaches today like Blue Green deployment or Canary deployment (you can pick the one that works better for you). By doing that you will achieve better risk management and be able to react quickly when needed

Define clear role and responsibilities In between your teams and people everyone should know what is expected from him/her and what he/she should expect to get from the people in the chain. Starting from product managers through engineering and QA all the way to Devops and SRE. Clear definitions will improve the entire team productivity

As always, if more info or help are needed feel free to reach out at info@ngoconsulting.co