Full Cycle Development

What is full cycle development?

Full cycle development is a software development methodology where a development team owns the full software development lifecycle, including requirements, development, testing, deployment, and operations. Coined by the Netflix engineering team, full cycle development was used effectively to accelerate feedback loops and learning.

Impact today

Full cycle development has gained increasing popularity in cloud-native organizations. By empowering teams to truly own a microservice, feedback and iteration cycles are accelerated. In addition, full cycle development teams are incented to build software that is highly reliable -- after all, the team is the one that will be woken up if their service goes down.

As technology ecosystems evolve, full cycle development is poised to play an even more critical role. Here are some trends and implications for organizations adopting this approach:

• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Organizations will increasingly rely on cross-functional teams that blend skills from different disciplines, promoting a more holistic approach to software development.
• Focus on DevOps Practices: The overlap between development and operations continues to grow, emphasizing the importance of DevOps practices in facilitating full cycle development.
• Sustainable Practices: With the onus of maintenance on them, teams will prioritize sustainable coding practices that make future updates and scalability easier.