what you need to know at the start

Hello! This is Elena Platkovskaya, I work on building and optimizing IT processes.

When new colleagues who had not had much contact with IT joined our team, it became clear that we needed to align our terminology in order to better understand each other at meetings. We did this within the framework of the LUC club, which I described in detail here.

The task was to provide basic knowledge about working in IT, to offer a well-structured basis on which colleagues could google more details. The goal was to provide a starting point for further sleepless nights spent hugging search engines. The result was a short presentation with universal information in pictures without reference to the functionality of an employee who is taking the first step on the path to IT.

When I started preparing, I encountered a difficulty. On the one hand, the Internet is full of materials for beginners. On the other hand, I didn’t find that magic page, a single link to which would be enough for the first acquaintance. That’s why I mixed my own mixture, which was suitable for express immersion in IT.

I am sharing with you the slides that we have produced and which we have included as mandatory study in the onboarding program for newcomers without experience in IT.

Types of IT

IT is everywhere, around us and we are immersed in it. By the way, not only when we order a taxi or listen to music. I collected some types in the picture:

At the end of this list I put a bold ellipsis, because not everything is listed.

For convenience in this publication, I will use the term software to refer to any digital product.

Software architecture

Let's take a look at the internal structure of almost any software. Developers write code, then combine lines of code into functions, functions into classes, and classes into modules. The result is a service. Complex IT products consist of many such services – for example, large corporate portals. This is very similar to houses consisting of walls, doors, furniture. At the same time, the buildings may look the same on the outside, but inside each will have an individual interior reflecting the ideas of its owner. The same is with IT development: what will be inside the final product depends on the needs.

At the very beginning, even before writing the code, a general plan for the future software is created – system architecture. That is, a simplified idea of the future product is formed, that is, a house, but without furniture yet. This plan also displays how internal services will interact with each other and the outside world. For example, how an online store will connect with payment systems or social networks via API. API (English, application programming interface) is a special set of rules that allows different parts of the system to interact with each other.

The next stage is detailing, where specific technical requirements for the product are worked out. As a result of developing the system architecture, the team should have an idea of what needs to be developed: what IT product and what functions it should perform.

Two approaches to design

Depending on the needs and complexity of the future software, there are two approaches to its design at the architectural level: monolithic And microserviceThis has nothing to do with the external appearance and is only about the internal structure.

SDLC

Software life cycle – stages that any software goes through, starting from the birth of the initial idea to its immediate “release”. It is also called SDLC – English, Software Development Life Cycle.

In essence, this is a sequence of software creation processes, which consists of 6 stages and covers the period from the moment the decision to develop it is made until it is no longer used. Each stage is based on the result of the previous one. I have displayed each stage in more detail in the infographic:

PDLC

PDLC (English, Program Development Life Cycle) – an iterative cycle of continuous improvement and optimization of a product. A set of processes for creating a product from the idea to its release to the market.

It consists of seven stages, which in my picture I optimized, reducing to 6:

1. Idea generation

2. Market research

3. Development of the product concept

4. The Development itself

5. Testing

6. Market launch

7. Post-launch period

The relationship between SDLC and PDLC is schematically as follows:

For example, a company plans to launch a state-of-the-art refrigerator in the future – a product that will undergo all stages of PDLC. At the same time, the development of the “filling”, i.e. software, will become part of this cycle and will be carried out according to SDLC.

Roles in IT

There are many, many professions in IT. Here are some of them:

1. Developers/programmers/developers create, write and support software, applications, services. Three main types:

· Frontend developers create what we see outside of any software

· Backend They are developing what is “under the hood”, the average user does not see this part, but thanks to it, any application is not just a pretty picture, but a working service.

· Full stack – combine the functionality of the first two categories.

2. Testers. Specialists who check the finished software for compliance with requirements, examine its functionality, and find errors (bugs). They are divided into automatic and manual ones.

3. A business analyst is a bridge between the customer and the developers. He collects requirements, analyzes them, and records them in a form understandable to developers. He answers the question “What are we developing?”, “What will users do in the finished system?”

4. A systems analyst also develops requirements for software, but answers the question “How should the system be configured so that the user can perform a certain set of actions in it?”

5. Information security specialists/security professionals. Professionals who protect information from digital threats.

6. DevOps engineer (eng., deveopment operations) – multidisciplinary specialists who can automate processes and know how developers, QA and managers work.

7. Project managers solve management tasks: organize a team, build processes, plan work, monitor execution, control the progress of work, communicate a lot with customers and collect feedback from them.

And many, many, many other specialists.

Development Methodologies

What is contained in this block is often asked about, including in interviews, so you need to study in more detail the basics that are shown in the picture yourself.

In short, methodology is an approach to development. It is important to remember that there are no good or bad ones – there are those that are suitable and those that are not suitable for developing a specific IT product. There are many of them, let's look at the most common ones.

Exist cascading (Waterfall) and flexible (Agile) methodologies, the work of which varies greatly.

In turn, flexible ones are also divided into subtypes. The most popular ones are: Scrum, Kanban and SAFe for companies with a large number of projects and teams whose work they are trying to synchronize and structure.