Application life cycle management with SharePoint customizations

One of the key elements that all developers need to think about the long-term is life cycle management for your solutions. Application lifecycle management, or ALM, is a huge topic in itself, but we feel it's important to underline the aspects of ALM as it touches the SharePoint Framework.

One of the larger missing pieces with the add-in model since 2013 was that it mostly lacked a proper model for managing the life cycle of your deployments and solutions. The act of life cycle management involves multiple tasks within any given development project, including:

• Managing source code and assets
• Versioning source code
• Building solutions
• Testing code
• Deploying solutions
• Retracting solutions
• Managing solutions
• Updating solutions

ALM for the SharePoint Framework is still at a fairly nascent, but evolving stage. This does not mean that managing the life cycle of the SharePoint Framework project is impossible or a complex undertaking. It is still something that will take time, effort, and resources to get right for your project. But at the same time, it's more than critical to implement or otherwise future updates, or simply changing anything in your code becomes next to impossible to manage.

The SharePoint Framework does not include ALM tooling, such as for continuous integration, as it's client-side code is packaged and deployed to SharePoint. Microsoft does, however, provide support for multiple toolsets and services that can be hooked into your development workflow. We'll list the typical ones next, but if you have a preferred choice of your own, feel free to replace any of these with your own.