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End-to-end software delivery

Software Development Life Cycle

An end-to-end view of how software moves from an identified opportunity through planning, design, implementation, release, operation, learning, maintenance, and retirement.

Show SDLC in the concept graph11 lifecycle stages

Lifecycle stage

Discovery and Product Planning

Establish the customer problem, business context, expected outcomes, constraints, and investment rationale before committing to a solution.

Documentation artifacts

  • BRD
  • Roadmap
  • Business case
  • Opportunity assessment
  • Product vision

Working artifacts

  • Problem statement
  • Outcome hypotheses
  • Prioritized opportunities
  • Initial success metrics

Typical owners

  • Product management
  • Business analysis
  • Product leadership

Stakeholders involved

  • Customers and users
  • Executive leadership
  • Sales and marketing
  • Finance
  • Engineering leadership

Lifecycle stage

Requirements Engineering

Discover, analyze, validate, document, and manage functional and non-functional requirements so delivery teams share a testable understanding of the intended system.

Documentation artifacts

Working artifacts

  • User stories and use cases
  • Validated requirements baseline
  • Assumptions and constraints
  • Acceptance examples

Typical owners

  • Product management
  • Business analysis
  • Requirements engineering

Stakeholders involved

  • Customers and users
  • Software engineering
  • QA
  • Security and compliance
  • Operations

Lifecycle stage

Software Architecture and System Design

Define the system structure, boundaries, interfaces, data flows, quality attributes, deployment topology, and major technical decisions.

Documentation artifacts

Working artifacts

  • Architecture baseline
  • Interface contracts
  • Data model
  • Threat model
  • Capacity assumptions
  • Proofs of concept

Typical owners

  • Software architects
  • Senior software engineers
  • Solutions architects
  • Data architects

Stakeholders involved

  • Product management
  • Software development teams
  • Security
  • Infrastructure and platform engineering
  • Data engineering
  • Operations and SRE

Lifecycle stage

Sprint Planning and Backlog Refinement

Break approved product and architecture intent into small, ordered, estimable, testable units of delivery with clear dependencies and acceptance conditions.

Documentation artifacts

Working artifacts

  • Product Backlog
  • Estimates and dependency map
  • Delivery plan
  • Risk and spike items

Typical owners

  • Product owner
  • Engineering team
  • Engineering manager or delivery lead

Stakeholders involved

  • Product management
  • QA
  • Design
  • Architecture
  • Business stakeholders

Lifecycle stage

Software Development

Implement, review, integrate, and document software while maintaining code quality, security, testability, and alignment with the approved design.

Documentation artifacts

Working artifacts

  • Source code
  • Automated tests
  • Build artifacts
  • Database migrations
  • Code-review decisions

Typical owners

  • Software developers
  • Software engineers

Stakeholders involved

  • Product management
  • QA
  • Security
  • Platform engineering
  • Architecture

Lifecycle stage

Quality Assurance and Verification

Verify that the system satisfies requirements and quality expectations through planned, risk-based functional and non-functional testing.

Documentation artifacts

Working artifacts

  • Automated and manual test results
  • Defect backlog
  • Coverage and quality evidence
  • Release recommendation

Typical owners

  • QA engineers
  • Software development teams
  • Test automation engineers

Stakeholders involved

  • Product management
  • Security
  • Operations and SRE
  • Business acceptance testers
  • Customers or pilot users

Lifecycle stage

Release Management

Prepare, approve, coordinate, deploy, and verify a software release while controlling operational, security, and business risk.

Documentation artifacts

Working artifacts

  • Versioned release package
  • Deployment pipeline execution
  • Migration scripts
  • Go-live checklist
  • Production verification evidence

Typical owners

  • Release management
  • Software engineering
  • Platform engineering

Stakeholders involved

  • Product management
  • QA
  • Security
  • Operations and SRE
  • Customer support
  • Business owners

Lifecycle stage

Operations and SRE

Operate the service safely in production by observing behavior, responding to incidents, managing capacity, and protecting reliability objectives.

Documentation artifacts

Working artifacts

  • Metrics, logs, and traces
  • Alerts and dashboards
  • Incident timeline
  • Capacity and reliability forecasts
  • Operational automation

Typical owners

  • SRE
  • Operations
  • Platform and infrastructure engineering
  • Service-owning engineering team

Stakeholders involved

  • Product management
  • Security operations
  • Customer support
  • Engineering leadership
  • Customers

Lifecycle stage

Product Analytics and Learning

Measure adoption, behavior, outcomes, reliability, and commercial performance so teams can validate assumptions and prioritize the next product decisions.

Documentation artifacts

  • Measurement plan
  • Experiment brief
  • Analytics specification
  • Product performance review

Working artifacts

  • Product dashboards
  • Funnel and cohort analyses
  • Experiment results
  • Customer feedback themes
  • KPI and business-metric trends

Typical owners

  • Product analytics
  • Product management
  • Data teams

Stakeholders involved

  • Software engineering
  • Design and research
  • Sales and marketing
  • Customer success
  • Executive leadership

Lifecycle stage

Maintenance and Continuous Improvement

Sustain and improve the system through defect correction, dependency upgrades, security remediation, performance work, refactoring, and technical-debt management.

Documentation artifacts

  • ADR
  • Postmortem
  • Maintenance backlog
  • Technical-debt register
  • Upgrade and migration plan
  • Deprecation notice

Working artifacts

  • Patches and corrective releases
  • Refactored components
  • Updated dependencies
  • Performance improvements
  • Reliability improvements

Typical owners

  • Service-owning engineering team
  • Maintenance engineering
  • Platform and infrastructure engineering

Stakeholders involved

  • Product management
  • Security
  • Operations and SRE
  • Customer support
  • Architecture

Lifecycle stage

Retirement and Decommissioning

Safely withdraw a product, service, interface, or platform while migrating users and data, satisfying retention obligations, and removing operational dependencies.

Documentation artifacts

  • Retirement decision record
  • Decommissioning plan
  • Customer migration plan
  • Data retention and deletion plan
  • End-of-life notice

Working artifacts

  • Migrated users and workloads
  • Archived or deleted data
  • Removed infrastructure and credentials
  • Closed operational dependencies
  • Final compliance evidence

Typical owners

  • Product management
  • Service-owning engineering team
  • Operations and SRE

Stakeholders involved

  • Customers
  • Customer support and success
  • Security and compliance
  • Legal and privacy
  • Finance
  • Dependent engineering teams