Agile System Development Lifecycle

Definitions

• Epic - High level overview of the project usually consisting of multiple features to be delivered
• Feature - is a client-valued functionality (feature) perspective.
• User Story - describes how the system should act for a specific user with a specific action.
• Task - the todo’s for each team member to deliver the user story
• Pull request - A process to communicate that changes to the system are ready to be reviewed [See Dev Process documentation on Pull request process]
• Peer Review - verifies coding standards, security standards, and architectural design standards are adhered too.

Testing Types:

• Unit Test - smallest testable parts of an application, called units, are individually and independently scrutinized for proper operation
• Functional test - describes what the system does by feeding inputs and examining outputs.
• Integration test - program units are combined and tested as groups in multiple ways (spanning to database, external services etc)
• Load Test - baseline performance of the app verifying Service Level Agreements
• Stress Test - max amount before app becomes unresponsive
• User Acceptance Tests - testing of user needs, requirements, and business processes conducted to determine whether a system satisfies the acceptance criteria and to enable the user, customers or other authorized entity to determine whether or not to accept the system
• Smoke/Product Verification Test - verifies all pieces are present, touches all major components, exercises new functionality

Manual/Subjective Testing

• Usability tests- systematic observation under controlled conditions to determine how well people can use the product.
• Exploratory Test - the personal freedom and responsibility of the individual tester to continually optimize the quality of his/her work by treating test-related learning, test design, test execution, and test result interpretation as mutually supportive activities that run in parallel throughout the project

Feature enable-ment - use Feature toggles to separate deployment from activation () A/B testing - comparing two versions of a web page/feature to see which one performs better Canary releases - reduce the risk of introducing a new software version in production by slowly rolling out the change to a small subset of users before rolling it out to the entire infrastructure and making it available to everybody

Pre Release Activities:

• Epic/Feature/User Stories created
• Source Code Created
• Unit Tests completed
• Peer Review completed
• Pull Request completed

Software Distribution Procedures

• All applications are deployed using a centralized deployment system.
• The system tracks when deployments occur, who initiated the action, and the results of the deployment.

Application is released into Testing Environment

Automated tests are run:

• Functional Tests
• Integration Tests
• Load Test
• Stress Tests
• Manual Testing is completed
• Usability tests
• Exploratory Test

Planning Releases

Criteria for release to production:

• User story state moves to “Release Ready” this indicates that it has been accepted by the business for code release into production.
  • completes the requirements for the system
  • all test cases are passed

Production Validation

• Production validation testing (aka Smoke testing) occurs once the code is migrated to the production environment.
• Successful production valadition the state of the user story is pending production activation indicating the user story is ready for the Feature to be enabled.

Communications

• After Production releases, changes are communicated to the field.

Monitoring

• System Up/Down
• System Errors and Exceptions
• Page load time/Route execution time
• Feature usage
• Abnormal user behavior
• Authentication failures
• Primary Key Indicators needed by Business Sponsor