Life Cycle and Product/System Life

¶ … Life Cycle and Product/System Life Cycle

Discuss the relationship between project life cycle and product/system life cycle. For this exercise, you may assume the spiral model for the product life cycle

When designing a product, a professional tends to focus only on the life cycle of the project itself, within the organization. But it is helpful to view this product in terms of a larger model used to describe the software industry. Life cycle models describe the interrelationships between software development phases of project design and product design such as the spiral model, presented by Boehm in 1985. (Level 1A, 2004)

The spiral model is focused on risk management. A software life cycle model depicts the significant phases or activities of a software project from conception until the product is retired. It specifies the relationships between project phases, including transition criteria, feedback mechanisms, milestones, baselines, reviews, and deliverables. (Level 1A, 2004) The spiral model emphasizes the need to go back and reiterate earlier stages a number of times as the project progresses. This approach helps demonstrate a proof of concept early in the cycle, and it more accurately reflects the disorderly, even chaotic evolution of technology, as opposed to previous project and product design models, which stressed planning, implementation, and execution alone. (Kay, 2002) Like all life cycle models the spiral addresses the following phases of a software project: requirements phase, design phase, implementation, integration, testing, operations and maintenance. But the spiral model stresses the maintenance aspect more than general project models.

The spiral model stresses the need to constantly take into consideration the ability to simplify a product for the market and render it impermeable to advances by hackers. Indeed, much of the motivation behind utilizing a life cycle model is to provide structure to avoid the problems of the "undisciplined hacker." Thus, the model seems particularly applicable for today's virus and worm-beset times.