MTA Microsoft Technical Associate (Exam 98-361)

Index

1. Introduction
2. General Software Development
1. Application Life-Cycle Management
2. Application specification

1. Introduction

I am preparing the exam 98-361, Microsoft Technical Associate, the first certification you can get to start your career in Microsoft Technologies. Is not mandatory get it before other more advanced certifications but is a good step into the Certifications world. Apart of the information and knowledge you can get in the following posts, I would like to tell you about one really interesting book that covers all the points of the exam: 98-361 Software Development Fundamentals

Below, the most important points for the following posts that are based in the "Software Development Fundamentals" training course from Microsoft Virtual Academy:

1. General Software Development
2. Core Programming
3. Object-Oriented Programming
4. Web Applications
5. Desktop Applications
6. Understanding Databases

In this post I will try to give you a small overview of the life cycle in software development. The different steps the developers follow over and over during an IT project.

2. General Software Development

2.1 Application Life-Cycle Management

Is not about coding, this is more about how to manage the life of an IT project, since the requirements are collected from the customer/user, the analisys and design of those requirements using different types of diagrams (classes diagrams, user stories, flow charts ...), the test phase where the testers check the application to see if the functionality is correct and the final deployment.

• Requirements: this role can be the same developer or even a third party company. The requirements document collect all the different features that the application will need to cover. This phase is high relevant to avoid working on features not required in the project and misunderstand the needs of the customer.
• Design: is made typically by someone who understands perfectly the business of the applications but also someone who has technological skills. The applications functions are covered at this point and how they will work. Typically are used different diagrams and user stories to understand the logic processes.
• Development: typically a technical specifications document is made to understand how to implement the different designs to be able to code those requirements.
• Test: during the development process, very often unit tests have been created to be able to check the functionality of our developments. Is the best way to validate if the different parts of the application are working properly. Beta versions are released to be tested before the final version of the product is released.
• Maintain: at this point our application has been deployed into the user environment but nothing is perfect, probably we can get some errors or issues that we need to fix with future patches or new versions realeses. 

2.2 Application Specification (Functional specifications)

At this point appear two main documents very useful for the developers, which contain the most important information related with the features of an application and required to develop them (Why we're doing this? What's the problem we are trying to solve?). They are several documents used by Architects and Developers like Classes Diagrams or User Story Diagram but we will focus on two examples:

• Feature List: specific description for the different functionalities of parts in our application. Ex: get the current price of an article from a spreadsheet and compare with the rest of the products in the database. There is no specific implementation details is just a high-level overview. Is more about the problems we are trying to solve and how to get there.
• Feature Overview: is a more detailed document where we can get a better understanding of the different points in the feature list. Why we are doing this and what is the meaning of a particular feature?

Is enough for today, I hope with this post you got a better understanding of how the IT projects are managed. In the following post we will try to focus on core programming. I hope to see you next time :)