Life Cycle Pattern

Abstract

The Life Cycle Pattern defines four Viewpoints that allow the aspects of a System's Life Cycle to be captured. The Life Cycle Viewpoint identifies the Stages that exists in a Life Cycle. The Life Cycle Model Viewpoint describes how each Stage behaves over time in relation to the other Stages. The Interaction Identification Viewpoint identifies the Life Cycle Interaction Points between a number of Life Cycles. Finally, the Interaction Behaviour Viewpoint describes the behaviour of each Life Cycle Interaction Point in relation to other Life Cycle Interaction Points as identified in an Interaction Identification Viewpoint. The Life Cycle Model Viewpoint presented here is the minimal version of the Viewpoint - it can be extended to show the Process Execution Groups that are executed in each Stage of a Life Cycle Model as well as the processes executed within each Process Execution Group. This allows the use of the Life Cycle Pattern to bridge the gap often found in Systems Engineering between the defined Systems Engineering processes followed by the systems engineers developing a System and the project plans produced by project managers tasked with managing the development of the System. For a full discussion of this, see Holt and Perry (2013).