Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering

Chapter 2. About the Life Cycle

The term software life cycle refers to an organizing scheme for talking about the process of software construction. That hasn’t always been the case. Although it began innocently enough, fairly soon expressions of the life cycle began to take on aspects of a religion. They became, for those so inclined, a rigid description of the steps to be taken—and the order in which they should be taken—to build good software. People called this rigid version of the life cycle the waterfall life cycle. The waterfall was a process that flowed only downstream, from one life cycle step to the next. Methodologies were built around it The more popular the waterfall cycle became among some segments of the software community, ...