Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Engineering and operations teams have a measurement problem that most other functions don't. The technical metrics are excellent. Deployment frequency is up. MTTR is down. Uptime is at 99.97%. The CI/CD pipeline is running cleanly and the on-call burden has been reduced by 30% since the team adopted a proper incident management process. By every internal measure, the team is performing well. And yet, in the quarterly business review, the conversation keeps returning to the same uncomfortable question: what did engineering actually deliver for the business this quarter?

The Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) describes the process we follow to deliver software to customers. It captures each step of creating software, from ideation to delivery and eventually to maintenance. In this post, we've broken down everything you need to understand the SDLC.