On Kovshenin.com there's a recent post looking at the whole development lifecycle of web-based applications, breaking it out into the three main steps - development, testing and production (splitting out some of these into other, smaller groupings).

Since January this year I've been working on a few projects with a team of over 5 people and high-demanding standards. This raised the problem of project managing and a completely different view of the web development cycle. In this article I'd like to outline the major steps of the software development cycle and how they could be applied to the web development business.

Along with the main three categories (dev, test and production) he also gets a bit more fine grained with things like:

• Development: Pre-alpha Stage
• Development: Beta Stage
• Testing: Release Candidate
• Production: General Availability