Application Development Methodology and Architecture

Application development is typically achieved through some sort of process, which guides the activity from initial requirements collection through deployment of a completed system. As a developer, you are most interested in the particular span of the process that covers application creation and testing.

There are a variety of development methodologies currently in use, such as the waterfall model, Rational Unified Process (RUP), and Agile methodologies. You can use any of these methodologies to create Force Platform applications.

Development methodologies can be as simple or as complicated as you need them to be, given the complexity of your application, the size of your team, or how deliberate your release process is. In a typical large enterprise, developers have private environments within which to do initial development, after which the application is taken through integration, functional and regression testing, QA, user acceptance testing, and staging, before being finally deployed to production. Depending on the team size and release formalisms in place, there may be many different envionments for these different stages.

The Force Platform allows developers to create Force Platform organizations as isolated environments, for development, test and user acceptance activities, and to migrate changes between these environments. This isolation is at the core of implementing your application development methodology.

The simplest example of these separate environments uses the Force Platform IDE to move a copy of metadata from one organization to another, as you will see below. This chapter also covers the ability to publish an application, making it available to multiple organizations.