SharePoint Application Development Life Cycle

SharePoint Application Development Life Cycle is the basic concept for every share Point developer. The SharePoint Application development has some additional important methodologies when compared with the usual software project life cycle.

SharePoint Development Life Cycle Process

•  Capture Business Requirements
• Solution Architecture
• Development and Build
• Testing
• Quality Assurance
• Deployment

Capturing  Business Requirements in SharePoint Projects

The SharePoint Business Analyst will work directly with business users to document requirements, analyze business problems and implement solutions. This requirement capturing process mainly covers, requirements elicitation, analyzing requirements, validating requirements,documenting requirements.

How does it happen ?

• Conduct an analysis of the existing SharePoint systems to ensure all functional requirements are understood and captured
• Using wireframes and UI mockups for describing business processes and expected functional modules
• Verifying all SharePoint procedures and limitations
• Educate stakeholders in SharePoint
• Document validated requirements, improvements and issues

Solution Architecture

The Solution architect is the most important role in the SharePoint Project Life cycle because he defines the structure of the ‘Solution Design ’of the Project. In this phase reference Architecture, reference implementations and tools for faster development of prototypes are defined

How does it happen ?

• Information Artifacts – (define data flow, use cases and managing artifacts)
• Information Architecture

o   How to organize the information in SharePoint Projects

o   Governance (Ownership, Retrieval and Security)

o   Contents and content types

o   Navigation and meta data

o   Users

o   Look and feel / SharePoint branding/Search

• Logical Architecture

o   Which features will be used and for what

o   Logical design of proposed solution

o   Service levels and administrative policies

• Capacity planning and physical architecture (network Requirements and storage managements)

Approaches in Development and Build

The term “SharePoint Development” always brings up some difficult discussions when combined  with “Developers” who use Visual Studio, write managed code (C#/VB.NET) and “Developers” who use SharePoint Designer and write client side code (HTML/JavaScript/XSLT) to build their applications. Essentially these are both forms of SharePoint Development.

How does it happen ?

• Analysis, design, development, and deployment in SharePoint
• Conformance to the coding guidelines
• Team development
• Standalone development environment
• Shared development SharePoint Server
• Team Foundation Server

Approaches to Testing and Quality Assurance

Since SharePoint is a collaborative platform due to the wide range of rich features, configuration options and the functionalities it provides, it becomes obligatory to test and track applications with systematic understanding in terms of functionality, usability, security, performance and various platform layers.

How does it happen ?

• Build Test Environment
• Use Test Tools and Automated Testing
• Use Mocking Frameworks
• Unit Tests and UI Tests
• User Experience
• Quality testing in each phases

Deployment

Deployment is the final step of the entire SharePoint Project Life cycle.

• Standardize deployment
• Deployment using Power shells