An Application Lifecycle in 8 Phases (Continued)

From Vision to Development
As can be expected, the corporate application lifecycle (see Figure 1) begins with a vision, a vision that responds to a perceived business need (also see "Life Begins at Requirements"). At this stage, the application can take the form of either a commercial software product or new code developed in house. Despite the obvious differences in process for each product type, both will nevertheless need to go through each stage of the cycle.

The vision is crucial to the project. An improper vision can be disastrous if it doesn't properly represent both needs and expectations. This is why the business decision makers should drive this stage of the lifecycle. Discussions should also involve all the players in the cycle from the onset of the project. This way, each player can express his or her own concerns and preoccupations—preoccupations that can be integrated into the vision—ensuring a more complete understanding of the project's scope and objectives.

The second stage focuses on planning. This involves two major players: the project manager and the designer or architect for the solution. The project manager is responsible for the planning and preparation of the project itself. The architect is responsible for the design of the solution. In both cases, the plans should take into account every aspect of the lifecycle, not only the development and testing aspects. Don't make the traditional mistake of focusing only on the initial phases of the project to the detriment of the latter phases. Make sure you take into account the stages that affect the life of an application within your production environment.

Also make sure you cover these items in this phase: cost of the application throughout the entire cycle; benefits of the change; required resources and resource availability; risks for the project and for the business; and impact of the change on existing infrastructures and resource levels.

The third phase comprises development. In the case of an in-house application, this means actual coding. Here, the architectural elements designed in the previous phase can be brought to bear to mitigate development risks. This means making use of the advanced features of integrated development environments such as Microsoft Visual Studio .NET or IBM WebSphere Studio to design development templates that include both project architectural orientations and best practices (see Resources). Capturing expert knowledge and integrating it into a template that controls how junior developers will create the program is one of the best ways to mitigate risk during the development phase.

In the case of a commercial software product that is to be introduced into the corporate network, development activities will focus on discovery of the product features and installation requirements as well as custom configuration. The installation should be packaged to meet corporate standards and should properly coexist with other applications within the network. Products used to support this phase for commercial software include software-packaging tools such as Wise Package Studio or InstallShield AdminStudio (see Resources).