What Are SDLC Tools?

Throughout the software development process, developers will have to create code,
test it, release it to production, document it, and keep their team updated on its
progress. That can be overwhelming for one person to do on their own! But it
doesn’t have to be this way. You can find several tools to help you and your devs
handle all tasks much easier. SDLC tools are crucial for effective software project
management. Specific solutions like charting tools and tables make developers’
jobs easier so they don’t get lost during the project’s chaos and confusion.
Types of SDLC Tools
SDLC tools come in many different varieties, and each type will help your
engineering org achieve different things. So it’s important to understand the
differences in order to choose the right SDLC tools for your business.

Automation Tools
If your developers are frustrated because their code is always stuck, SDLC
automation tools can help. With SDLC automation tools, you can boost your
teams’ productivity and efficiency, improve CM/CI/CD, and shorten the delivery
cycle and release and recovery times, while also increasing communication within
your engineering organization. This way, your org will be more aligned with
DevOps practices, which focus on automation during the iterative phases of
continuous merge, continuous integration, continuous deployment, and continuous
delivery.

Management Tools
It can be challenging to get your teams to produce high-quality software in a short
amount of time and at a low cost. But with the help of SDLC management tools,
your dev teams can create software quickly, efficiently, and reliably. These tools
even include comprehensive guidelines on creating, extending, and maintaining the
software. They’ll also equip you with concrete data to show the execs exactly what
your teams are doing.
Testing Tools
Look, your teams need to be testing their code. Exploits are far too common
nowadays, and nobody wants to get a wake-up call for a breach. If your teams
leave all their testing to the end of the life cycle, you can easily create a bottleneck
that wipes out productivity. Integrating testing tools into your SDLC allows your
teams to “shift left” and prioritize a more secure final product.
Security Tools
One of your company’s most precious resources is the code and data stored in your
applications. Can you imagine how bad it’d be if an unauthorized third party
accessed your system? Scary thought, even if it’s just imagination. So if you want
to prevent anyone from stealing, altering, corrupting, or deleting your sensitive
information, you can use one of the many security tools out there. These tools can
routinely scan the code and the infrastructure, systems, and SDLC pipelines used
to manage application data to find vulnerabilities and threats.

Analytics Tools
If you don’t know where your teams are struggling, you won’t be able to help them
get over their obstacles. That’s why today’s development teams can’t function
without SDLC analytics tools, which are useful in many different contexts. For
example, they can show you where teams are placing the most effort, so you can
help them stay on-course and meet their deadlines. Analytics tools also help make
teams’ efforts more public. They’ll help identify bottlenecks, so you know where
you can make an impact.

Planning Tools
If you don’t help your teams come up with plans, their projects won’t get off the
ground. Your teams will simply end up with a pile of spaghetti code or more
planned features than they know what to do with. If you truly want your teams to
align with DevOps culture — which is based on communication, collaboration, and
making optimal decisions for your development process — you need to use SDLC
planning tools. And this will enable sprint planning, release management, and issue
tracking.
Documentation Tools
Lacking good documentation can be a huge issue for internal teams and anyone
working with your product. If you don’t provide good documentation, your teams
will struggle to know what code does what. So you need comprehensive and
reliable documentation for software in your software development lifecycle — and
SDLC documentation tools can help you streamline this process.

Best SDLC Tools

If you want to keep your teams happy and performing at top efficiency, you need to
give them an arsenal of the best SDLC tools. Here are our top 10 picks:

1. Jira
Workflow management can be difficult for many teams, but this program
makes it easy. Jira was initially meant to be a straightforward way of
monitoring projects and fixing problems. But now, your teams can use this
tool for anything, from agile software development to testing scenarios and
managing requirements.

2. GitHub
Without a doubt, GitHub has the largest user base of any platform dedicated
to creating software. It’s a cloud-based service for hosting Git repositories
— like Google Drive, but for source code. Your devs can use GitHub to
upload their projects privately or publicly to safekeep or share them. They
also take advantage of work other devs have already uploaded to the
platform. Imagine how much time and work that’d save your teams!

3. Tricentis Tosca
The Tricentis Tosca platform has a simple user interface that allows non-
programmers to work together on projects by creating test cases without
scripting. The tool also has a built-in capability to track requirements’
history and their relative importance. This will make your org’s testing
process more efficient as test engineers can keep tabs on progress and run
the right number of automated tests — without much trial and error.
4. SonarQube
SonarQube is a free, open source tool that quickly and easily conducts
comprehensive code reviews. This tool analyzes the source code for
potential security flaws, bad programming practices, and defects —
something your devs might be spending countless hours doing. At present,
SonarQube supports 30+ programming languages. If you integrate this
SDLC tool into your DevOps workflow, you’ll enable your team leads to get
real-time feedback for all team members.

5. Bit.ai
Bit.ai is a cutting-edge software documentation and knowledge management
solution that consolidates an organization’s in-house knowledge in one
central location. This way, it makes information easier to share and manage.

6. LinearB
This SLDC management tool ensures you’re effectively managing your
engineering org’s productivity. LinearB correlates data from your Git,
project, release, and incident management tools, so you have a consolidated
view of software engineering productivity metrics, like planning accuracy.

7. Codacy
Codacy is an automated tool for software analysis and quality assurance —
and it performs a thorough evaluation. This tool can also work with many
programming languages and other tools.

8. WorkerB
WorkerB is an SDLC automation tool that streamlines your org’s code
review process. It uses Slack & MS Teams to reduce idle time between task
hand-offs. It also helps devs prioritize their day, automate annoying tasks,
and review and approve small PRs directly from their WorkerB notifications.

9. gitStream
Merging devs are happy devs. Automation is key to improving developer
experience. Unfortunately, half of all pull requests (PRs) are idle for 50% of
their lifespan. Even worse, most of the time PRs waiting 4+ days to be
reviewed result in “LGTM.” This is a poor developer experience.
10. ESLint
ESLint is a tool for analyzing static code. Mistakes are inevitable when
developers work on code, and they, unfortunately, take up a lot of time and
resources to find and fix. This is where linters come into play! Tools like
ESLint can find mistakes, suggest ways to fix them, and even address some
already existing problems. ESLint even allows you to customize it to work
with your existing configurations and enforce coding standards. So it can be
extremely helpful if your teams primarily use JavaScript.