Experiences with getting started in the software development lifecycle

Warm greetings to all my lovely readers! I hope you are having a good day/ evening at the time you’re reading this blog. With that said, welcome to my WIT, Week 7 blog, today I’ll be giving you an insight into my experience with getting started on the software development lifecycle.

Now, before getting down to serious business, let me just playback to the very start of Week 6, where, we are introduced to the said concept through weekly tasks. SDLC, in particular, caught my eye from the start. It had been a part of my bucket list to build an app that takes care of people’s mental health, for the longest time, and what could be more exciting than the introduction of this topic to our weekly tasks itself! A wish-fulfillment for me, to be honest.

So, allow me to take you on my journey of highs and lows with SDLC. But before that, I’d like to introduce you to the concept of a ‘Software Development Lifecycle’.

What exactly is a Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC)?

SDLC is a process followed for a software project, within a software organization. It is a detailed plan that describes how to develop, maintain, replace, and modify or improve specific software. The life cycle defines a methodology for improving the quality of the software and the overall development process.

My story with SDLC:

It was just during one of our daily Stand-Up calls that our mentor, Gaurav, asks us to list down the requirements of a social media app we’d like to design. A gazillion ideas run into my mind. “The anonymous chat feature for people to openly discuss their issues with strangers online, with a streak score feature?! Oh, the digital self journal!! Or the blog writing?!” I thought to myself, as my brain appeared to have been running short of brain cells to store the information it came up with every millisecond. A few features were listed down during the meeting by the team members within the meeting itself, after which we were asked to create a workflow for the Social- media application.

I sit down, with my laptop and launch open the ‘whimsical website’, and start brainstorming all the ideas I could think of.

“Where to start from though?” I briefly thought to myself and proceeded to look into one of the team member’s workflows for getting a headstart. After getting an idea as to “How?” I went on to use my documented requirements to create the workflow. A few good minutes pass by, and I get the hang of using the website and after an hour or half, I have my workflow created. Satisfied with my work I take one last look at it I saved the file and shut down my laptop.

In the next stand-up call, our works are analyzed, feedback is given and our journey with workflow creation comes to end.

Now we level up to the part where things became a bit complex for me, ‘The high-level architecture’. So, what exactly is it? Well, a High-level Architecture explains the architecture that would be used to develop a system. If I could explain it in a simpler language, it would be a map-like representation of our workflow, that would explain the technology consumed by the said features of the workflow.

We were expected to cut short some ideas for the time being and come up with a simpler version of our earlier workflow- the idea was to break down our work into smaller chunks so that at least we would have the structure of our application all set. We could then add modifications to it as per our choice.

The concept of high-level architecture was explained quite nicely by our mentor, but I still seem to be lost on the implementation part. After spending hours, watching tons of videos on the said concept, I branched out to my team members for help. This did improve my understanding to some extent but didn’t help me to come up with something solid.

It was time I finally branched out to our mentor. Under his help and guidance, I cleared all my queries on “why”, “how”, and “where” and finally completed the task.

By the end of the week, I seem to explore the tip of the iceberg named, the Software Development Cycle and I couldn't be more excited to dive deeper into it!