Steps Involved in Modern Application Development

This section introduces a workflow diagram showing the various steps involved in a modern application development lifecycle then gives introductory information on each of the diagram's steps.

As said elsewhere, this documentation is concerned with modern application development in general rather than any specific named instance of modern application development.

The following figure shows the steps involved in the definition of modern application development used by this documentation.

The diagram shows the five main activities that make up the development process:

• Plan
• Build
• Test
• Release
• Monitor

Note that there are no start and end points to this sequence of activities. Whereas one might expect the "Release" activity to mark the end of the process, that activity is followed by the "Monitor" activity where questions are asked about improvements that could be made to the released package as well as to the development process and how it was executed. The information from the "Monitor" activity is then used as input to the "Plan" activity, and the development process continues from there.

Outside the five activities are the broader processes that have evolved to optimize the way in which the individual activities work together. These processes are as follows, and each one is covered in more detail in this documentation:

• Agile methods
• Continuous integration
• Continuous delivery
• Continuous improvement