Is it possible to put the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) on the Blockchain?

Why put SDLC on the blockchain anyway?

Putting the SDLC on a blockchain would let you create decentralized teams. Large teams of developers, managers, business analysts, testers and dev-ops engineers can come together and build software products without having to be situated in a single physical location.

Teams can be compensated automatically based on their contributions and/or pre-negotiated rates. Operations are then coordinated by the blockchain, instead of a human resource department or a manager approving time sheets.

The addition and removal of new developers from the team could be made a bit more democratic, as well.

Basically, putting the SDLC on a blockchain could open new doors that lead to decentralized processes.

How the various stages of development are decentralized so far and what some of it can do in the blockchain

Planning and defining
This is where the business case is set. Then, the functionality of the product is broken down in vague chunks called epics. Epics are then broken down to stories. Developers then work on those stories. To do this, we already have tools like Jira, Trello and Rally. While Jira and Rally are private, Trello lets planning teams make their thoughts public so that regular end users can view, like, comment and so on.

There's not much decentralization that could be done here, except, the members who were at the inception of the project could possibly reward selected particpants. A decentralized social media platform like Steemit could have its own reward mechanism, possibly.

Designing and Building

So far, an integration between Jira and Github has helped developers pick up designs in the form of tickets, then commit their code on github, leading to a direct communication between the two to update the status of the project. If a decentralized platform could track this activity, it could implement its own reward distribution mechanism to compensate developers for tasks completed.

Testing

Reward developers for writing unit tests and end to end tests. Then, record end-users' bug reports. Reward end-users for adding bug reports. Compensate developers based on bugs produced. Make the process democratic. Let the number of bugs be used as a metric for informational purposes only. Team members can rate each other's quality of work. Rewards will be distributed based on those ratings.

Deployment

Deploy it on a decentralized server (if it exists). But right now, a technique to track the product's usage and then reward the team as a whole would suffice. Features to add donations can be implemented; among many other ways to monetize the deployed product.

The gist

The gist, is to take a functioning software company out of the picture and replace the nitty-gritty operations with a blockchain. This means no more interviews, no more hiring risks, no more questions of job security and no more politics. Of course, the reality will be far different but at least this is a step in the right direction.