Traversing the Software Development Life Cycle

The software development life cycle provides a “template” outlining the various stages and activities involved in application development. This chapter describes and reflects on the author’s efforts to utilize the life cycle—including the ordering it provides—to introduce, structure, and contextualize various topics in a programming-heavy object-oriented application development course taught to third-year information science and technology students. Through multiple redesigns, the presented approach to the course blends practical and theoretical topics in object-oriented programming with a development workflow that incorporates use of version control throughout. To this end, the chapter also includes thoughts on the utilization of tools such GitHub Classroom to help manage submission and retrieval of student work as well as lessons learned.