Application Development Life Cycle Management with WSO2 App Factory (AF)

WSO2 App Factory(AF)  is an enterprise-grade Platform as a Service (PaaS), providing flexibility, completeness, reliability, scalability, security and application life-cycle management (ALM) options that an enterprise needs to encourage business innovation. 

Following Diagram illustrate different stages pass by the application in it's life cycle and interested working group of each stage.

I have list down the key steps in a Application Development Life Cycle Management(LCM) in the AF.

• Create a application in the trunk(1.0.0)- done by application owner  
• Start development in the trunk- developers start developments 
• Create the branch (1.0.0) - create the branch by developer or app owner 
• Do the developer testing.
• Promote to  QA - by developers 
• Start the QA - by QA engineers 
• report issues (bugs, improvements..etc ) - by QA 
• demote the Application 
• Developers fix the issues and do the developer testing - by developer 
• Again promote to QA - by developers 
• verify the reported issues and do other testing as well
• Promote the application into  production (most of the time via staging) 

Creating  the Application 

first create a App in the AF.Once you done this, trunk will be created for that App, then the developers can start working on the application.Person who created Application has the app owner role. Basically app owner has all the permission related to this application in any stage of the application.

Develop the Application

WSO2 Developer Studio provide a unique support for developers to develop, deploy and build application in a single environment. please refer the Working with App Factory Applications to learn how to use developer studio with AF





Basically Developers checkout the trunk and start working in the application. once they finish a task, developer will commit the changes into trunk then deploy and build the trunk. After stable the current trunk, branch will be created. If this is the first branch usually it will be named as 1.0.0 branch. Once branch created developers start working on branch do the developer testing and fix the issues. After completing following three key points application can be promote into the QA stage from Development-Stage. 

• Code complete 
• Design review done 
• Code review done 

Important :-
Developers cannot do any kind of code level changes after promoting the application, Only QA people can access the code.

QA the Application

Now application is running in the QA environment. Then QA people start working on the application, test case will be executed against the code ,if they find bugs they will create issues using  the AF issue tracker. QA person only can test the application he or she cannot do any code level changes when the application in the QA stage.

Found a Issue ! :-(

If  issues are reported then the application will be demote into the Dev Stage again.Those issues are added into the issue cracker and assign into relevant developers.Developer star fixing the issues reported by  QA. After closing all reported issues, application is promoted to QA again likewise this small cycle between QA and DevS happen until bug free the application. 

No Issues ! :-)

If  the application  does not having any issues  the application will be promoted to staging. In real world this step cannot reach at first time, most of the time application will be demoted several time and finally reach this step.Once Application promoted to the staging then the active branch will be frozen no body do code level changes after that. 

Application In Staging  

Now application is ready to go into production. Dev Ops will apply production environment related changes(change the database,Change the LDAP settings..... etc ) . Finally application will be  promoted into production.If any issue  occurs app will be demote into QA.  

Application In Action (Production)

Now the application is live and target users and groups can be used the application. After some times this application might not be covering all the business needs at that time new version of the application will be come to production and this will be retired !.