subject: Getting the Development Cycle Ready for Application Development [print this page] Getting the Development Cycle Ready for Application Development
IT architecture is a kind of a framework. It acts as a sort of a structure that offers the necessary help so that you can make optimum utilisation of the available resources throughout the length and breadth of the company. If you are part of a core IT organisation, you will realise that there are multiple frameworks in place. A technical architecture exists in most IT organisations and thus helps to locate the technical tools and products. It also determines the time at which each of these can be used appropriately. People in IT architecture jobs are responsible for defining data architecture and lay down crucial data fields.
Development architecture can be broadly defined to include three important fields. These include:
Application models that display the proper technical design that would ideally meet the requirements of the business
The diverse processes and development stages that form a part of the design life cycle and are thus used to create business applications
Building up the inventory and creating separate categories for diverse business applications that form a part of the organisation. In certain organisations, it is also referred to as application architecture.
An IT development manager is assigned the task of supervising the work of all these aspects. The development life cycle has an important role to play when it comes to application development.
The Application Development Process
The various processes connected to the development lifecycle constitute one of the chief areas of development architecture. It is necessary that companies, irrespective of their sizes, opt for a definition of their development life cycle. A number of development processes call for the designers, analysts and programmers to exercise their own skills and creativity. There are other aspects as well which can be governed by the introduction of standardised methods. Applications can either be developed using the RAD or the rapid application development approach or the conventional waterfall methods. While the former works by developing the solution in consecutive small steps, the latter includes multiple steps such as analysis, designing, coding and testing.
Creating the Development Life Cycle
People who have already worked on developing methodologies are aware of the fact that most of these can end up taking a good deal of your time and at the same time can be quite difficult to create. Doing the work in a detailed manner will ensure the fact that the project managers have a clear idea of the entire project. It may take as much as a year to get the detailed methodology of the life cycle in place. It is also necessary to find out which sections of the life cycle are indispensable and move ahead accordingly. However, at the same time, the IT development manager needs to know where to pull the stops when it comes to such detailing. It might happen that the documentation goes at length to describe every detail, whereas the crux of the matter has already been stated early in the document. The process should be rightfully ended at that point.
