Once the plan is established, the development teams get to work writing the code.

Once a developer is finished, they put the code in a repository – a kind of digital archive – and create a Pull Request (a request to change the source code). Another developer then checks the code and ideally clears it for use. Parallel to that, computer checks of the new code are also performed, in order to find possible errors.

Parallel to the tests in the Build phase, more in-depth automated and manual tests are performed in a separate environment.

In the Release phase, the release of the code into the productive environment is prepared.

In this phase, the build – the new version of a software – is rolled out. This can usually be done without interrupting normal operations.

The changes are now live and available to the users. This is where the Operations team tends to come in. The customer also has the opportunity to give their feedback here, which can then be acted upon later.

In addition to the customer feedback, other data are also collected, for example about any errors that may occur. This feedback then flows back to the software developers, who use it to derive the next features.