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...