The software life cycle

In software engineering, the software life cycle is a frequently used manner of organizing the software development process. Figure 2 shows a strongly simplified version of the life cycle taken from a standard textbook [35]. It consists of the following phases:

• Requirements engineering: collect the requirements and expectations from the future owners and users of the system.
• Design: translate the requirements in a specification that describes the global architecture and the functionality of the system.
• Implementation: build the system.This amounts to transforming the design into software source code.
• Testing: test that the implemented system conforms to the specification.
• Maintenance: install, maintain and gradually improve the system.

It should be emphasized that the software life cycle covers design and construction of a software product as well as its use. Each phase contains a Validation and Verification (V&V) sub-phase in which the quality of the deliverables of that phases are controlled. Also note the backward arrows that make this into a real ``cycle'': it is possible to discover in later phases that decisions made in a previous phase have to be revised.

We will now proceed in three steps. First, a defensive Patent-aware Software Life Cycle is sketched that ensures that the software development organization does not infringe patents of third parties. Next, a more offensive Patent-based Software Life Cycle is described that also considers the options to file patent applications for knowledge that has been generated in each phase of the life cycle. Finally, the IPR-based Software Life Cycle extends the previous one to all IPR options: secrecy, copyrights and patents.