Software Engineering, 10th Edition

2.1 Software process models

As I explained in Chapter 1, a software process model (sometimes called a Software Development Life Cycle or SDLC model) is a simplified representation of a software process. Each process model represents a process from a particular perspective and thus only provides partial information about that process. For example, a process activity model shows the activities and their sequence but may not show the roles of the people involved in these activities. In this section, I introduce a number of very general process models (sometimes called process paradigms) and present these from an architectural perspective. That is, we see the framework of the process but not the details of process activities.

These generic models ...