SharePoint Application Lifecycle Management – with a Case Study

I got an email from a follower asking me to explain him how a SharePoint project is done from Requirement Gathering to Go Live. This post is to answer his question.

Application Life cycle remains the best lesson learnt by all Developers so far. If someone does not know this, they might not be able to call themselves as a developer and this process serves as the base too. Let us look into it closely on SharePoint Application perspective. Even though this cycle has a common step by step, it differs based on the requirement and working environment.  Let’s look at the common life cycle steps first:

1.       Requirement Gathering – Requirements are turn into feasible tasks
2.       Development – Developers use various tools to develop and for SharePoint, It is usually Visual Studio or SharePoint Designer
3.       Testing – Once developed, application is tested well before implementation
4.       Implementation  in UAT Server (User Acceptance Test Server) or sometimes called as pre-production Server
5.       Changes after UAT done by developers if any
6.       Implemented to Production by administrators
7.       Users feedback their experience and ideas

Example: Let’s do a small case study to see how a project is done from start to end.  Users are requesting an Intranet portal to be developed in SharePoint to be built from scratch.

As per the life cycle, requirement gathering comes first. Let’s say, users want the below to be shown on the home page and some more.

1. Announcements
2. Calendar of Events
3. Employee Spotlight
4. Standalone Image which acts like a hyperlink to point to some other application from the same company

The team lead will translate the above to tasks. For announcements, if the user is asking for displaying announcements in a set of sliding images, then jquery web part will be decided upon. For Calendar of Events, need to bring data from a SharePoint Calendar and show. This will be yet another web part. Employee Spotlight will be a picture display of the employee who is chosen as the best employee for the week. There should be a place for them to choose the best employee from a list of available employees. A working space has to be provided for them to do so. For Standalone Image out of the box web part content editor web part can be used.

This step involves more of analysis and planning.

The developer will start working on the following
1. Creating a site
2. Building Document Libraries, Lists
3. Update Master Page
4. Style Sheets and Jquery plugins
5. Develop web parts required for the site
6. Package them and Deploy in UAT Server after thorough testing in development platform.

Users will start testing in UAT server. If they feel like the image does not meet their requirement, or If the logic needs a change, will highlight and the cycle will come back to Developers

Developers will work on the changes and implement it again to UAT Server

If everything is working fine, users will sign off the UAT and administrator will implement the changes to production. Once it is in the production, many users will use the application and will share their ideas and request for changes. The process continues with user requesting changes and developers working on it.

Thanks for that someone for his question. Please keep posting more and help me share what I have learnt too.