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In the early days, there was Life Cycle

Basically four weeks since we started. For this lecture there were 3 readings to be discussed that were regarding the Life Cycle concept. Reading from the Soul of the New Machine and a retrospective exercise.


Let's start with What is life cycle? For Design, Development and Creativity module, a life cycle is a process that describes how to start and finish a high-tech project. Applying this definition, an organization may employ different life cycles for different projects. Life cycles simply provide local guidance on how to organize a development project team and (should) generally steer clear of prescribing the operational structure of the wider organization. (Higgins, 2015) URL: https://managingdesignanddevelopment.blogspot.ie/2011/09/life-cycle-concept.html


The first reading, McCraken, D. D & Jackon, M. A (1982) "Life Cycle concept considered harmful expressed the authors thoughts after joined a conference about systems analysis and design. At this time, the concept of life cycle followed the above steps:

  1. Organizational Analysis

  2. Systems Evaluation

  3. Feasibility Analysis

  4. Project Plan

  5. Logical Design (produces general design's specifications)

  6. Physical Design (produces detailed design's specifications)

  7. Program Design

  8. Implementation

  9. Operation

  10. Review and Evaluation

The authors discuss that most attendees were comfortable with the life cycle concept. However, they did not believe the process could be mapped onto each others, and if could, they presented three criticism points of what would be harmful.

  1. Life Cycle concept cannot be applied to all systems development

  2. The concept has a communication gap between end-user and system analyst

  3. Life Cycle concept in the conference offer very little possibility to change "Rigidifies thinking"

"Life Cycle structure cannot be the same for all systems development. Why? Because the systems purposes are also different and the life cycle concept should be changeable to fit these purposes" (McCraken, 1982)


According to the authors, it was literally unsuited to the needs of the 1980's developing systems.


The second reading was written by Gladden, G. R. (1982) "Stop the life cycle, I want to get off". The author does not agree with a linear life cycle method for developing software systems. He offers his perspective to the problem root and an "alternative approach to undertaking software projects"


The following figure, summarizes the author view of the problem.

Gladden (1982) then offer three new approaches:

  • System Objectives are more important than system requirements

  • A picture worth a thousand words (mock-ups)

  • System objectives plus physical demonstrations will result in a successful product

The third reading "No Silver Bullet Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering" (Brooks, Jr. F. P., 1987) divides software technologies into essence "difficulties inherent in the nature of software "and accidents "difficulties that attend its production but are not inherent".

The inherent essence properties are: Complexity; Conformity; Changeability and Invisibility. The accidents difficulties are: High-level languages; Time-sharing and Unified Programming Environments.

Moreover, it is outlined the "hopes for the silver bullet"

  • Ada and other high-level language advances

  • Object-Oriented Programming

  • Artificial Intelligence

  • Expert Systems

  • Automatic Programming

  • Graphical Programming

  • Program Verification

  • Environment and Tools

  • Work Stations

  • Buy versus build

  • Requirements refinement and rapid prototyping

  • Prototypes software systems

  • Incremental Development

  • Great Designers


After discussing the readings, there was a retrospective exercise aimed to identify the key characteristics of collaborative design and production projects. Therefore, each group was giver an A4 paper copied from "Allan Kelly's dialogue sheet" and the group would spend 30 minutes filling the paper information about the most recent project. The retrospective exercise is to find within the group collaboration what worked better, what did not work properly, what should have done and what should'n. The results is a group analysis and insights for improvements.


I hope you enjoyed this reading, which was more a summary of my week 4 lecture.






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