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Chapter 4
The Logic of Life
Cycles
All the business of war, and indeed all the business of life, is to endeavor
to find out what you don’t know by what you do.
— Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington
Croker Papers (1885), vol. iii, p. 276
The software profession’s first attempts at defining a life cycle for the
development of software were unashamedly based on the assembly line
concept that dominates manufacturing (see Exhibit 1). The fact that many
of the businesses that moved into the area of software in the 1960s and
1970s were manufacturing industries reinforced this philosophy. People
built the new product like they built the old product; they managed ...