1  Software development

Note

This guidebook is written following the diátaxis “how-to guide” style. And because this document reflects how we work in the Seedcase Project, it is living and constantly evolving. It won’t ever be in a state of “done”.

This chapter describes an approach to developing software that we’ve found to be effective at helping us build higher-quality, more reliable, and maintainable software products that get built faster and have less issues over time. It combines and mixes several development methods and best practices, starting from a high-level by following an iterative and incremental development approach with aspects of Kanban for project planning and management, including regular update and reflection meetings (called retrospectives). Within a given product, the workflow includes:

• Continuous integration (that includes automated testing and checking) through trunk-based development (with short-lived branches following the GitHub Flow)
• Continuous delivery/deployment
• Test-driven development
• Domain-driven design
• Documentation-driven development (using Diataxis framework to structure the documentation)

Tip

These practices and workflows are also described in many software development books and resources, such as:

• Philosophy of Software Design
• Domain Modeling Made Functional: Tackle Software Complexity with Domain-Driven Design and F#
• Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations
• Team Topologies

So, how do you integrate all of these together when developing software? That’s what this section is all about! 🎉

1.1 Visual overview

The following diagram gives a visual overview of the stages of development and how they connect. We’ll cover each part in more detail in the following sections.

flowchart TB
    Aim([Purpose and need<br>for software]) --> DDDesign([Domain-driven design])
    DDDesign --> Design>"Explanation docs<br>(for design)"]
    DDDesign --> DDDev
    DDDev([Documentation-driven<br>development]) --> Guide>How-to guides]
    Guide <--> Test
    Guide <--> Develop[Develop<br>implementation]
    Design --> Test([Test-driven development])
    Test <--> Develop
    Develop --> CodeDocs>"Reference docs<br>(for code)"]
    Develop --> Tutorials>Tutorials]
    Guide --> Tutorials
    Guide & Develop <--> Examples[Example real<br>world usage]

Figure 1.1: Software development workflow that combines domain-driven design, documentation-driven development, and test-driven development. Rounded boxes represent stages and methods of development, while indented rectangled boxes represent the output of those stages as documentation types. Rectangle boxes represent generic activities that integrate many stages together.

Underlying all of this is an iterative and incremental development approach (described in more detail in Chapter 3), continuously integrating the changes, and continuously deploying the software and associated documentation (as a website).