Tagged: SDLC

The traditional Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) assumes that software is principally a human-authored code artifact that moves through recognizable phases such as requirements, design, implementation, testing, deployment, and maintenance. That framing still describes much of contemporary practice, but it is becoming incomplete. Generative systems can now synthesize code, tests, documentation, and configurations directly from structured prompts, domain knowledge, and operational context. As implementation becomes cheaper and faster, the hardest work in software production shifts toward clarifying intent, curating domain knowledge, enforcing policy, verifying behavior, and sustaining accountability. This essay argues that software should increasingly be understood not simply as source code, but as executable behavior bounded by policy, data, and interfaces. It further argues that the software lifecycle should be reframed as a continuous process that transforms intent into verified runtime behavior. The proposed model, called the Intent-to-Verified-Behavior (IVB) lifecycle, is presented as a conceptual successor to code-centric SDLC thinking. The second article in this trilogy extends this argument into software architecture; the third applies it to customer-agent and service-agent ecosystems.