Summary

It is pivotal to understand the SDLC for anyone who wishes to write code. The SDLC should be thought of as a guide to properly develop software. No matter what you’re doing, you should always follow the SDLC as closely as you can so that your software will be easy to build, fix, and expand upon in the future.

This chapter has been a crash course in the SDLC, the methodologies that govern it, and the steps that it encompasses. Of all the chapters, I would argue that this is the most important. Too often, developers get caught up in what I like to call the code culture of just blindly building things with no roadmap of where they are, where they’ve been, or where they’re going. Being able to navigate the SDLC will set you apart from those developers as in-depth knowledge of the SDLC is what separates an engineer from a programmer. With these principles under your belt, you can build software that will be extraordinary.

At this point, you should have...