Software Development Lifecycle covers the process of making a software application with a software development team, from designing the system to implement, test, release and maintain the core functionalities.
The early software development practices until the 2000s were bound to traditional project management techniques, mostly known as the waterfall model. Software development teams had to gather all the requirements first. They then designed the system and interface. After that, they developed, tested, and deployed the finished product all at once. If a need to change any functionality arose, every stage had to be carried out again from scratch.
In that era, the World Wide Web either did not exist or it was too ineffective. Software ran either on personal computers or on monolithic servers within an organization.
As the web technologies progressed and the server infrastructure advanced with an exponential pace after 2000s, this technique has become impractical and outdated, failing to answer the needs of that era. Software development teams became larger and more dynamic, the infrastructure became virtualized as it became more powerful, and the stakeholders demanded faster product development.
This need led to the development of the Agile methodology—a simple concept to understand but challenging to follow in practice. You can think of this approach as breaking down requirements into smaller work items that are delivered in two-week development cycles. It works like multiple mini-iterations of the waterfall model applied in each cycle to a specific set of tasks. Thanks to Agile, the release order of new implementations can be prioritized, and the end product can be adjusted in every iteration based on evolving business needs and customer feedback.
The next level is already underway—as cloud-native systems evolve with the use of microservices and CI/CD tools within DevOps engineering infrastructures, development teams no longer need to release an entire software product to make a minor change in functionality. Instead, new code is deployed only for the relevant microservice, keeping the system running without downtime or interruptions.
The following infographic was generated by Google Gemini to visualize the history of software development:
