19-Soft-B6 Software Project Management, May 2015, Q5

Question 5 (10 marks)

Question text not reproduced: the examination questions are © Engineers and Geoscientists BC. Open the official past paper (linked at the top of this page) to read the question, then follow the worked solution below.

ISO/IEC 12207 organizes the software life cycle into six primary processes, executed by the different parties (acquirer, supplier, developer, operator, maintainer) involved across a system's life, underpinned by supporting and organizational processes (documentation, quality assurance, verification, configuration management, and others) that apply across all six.

Fig. Q5 — the six ISO/IEC 12207 primary processes, running left to right across a system's life, underpinned by the supporting/organizational processes that apply throughout.

Process	Purpose	Typical deliverables
Acquisition	The acquirer's activities in obtaining a system, product, or service — defining the need, selecting a supplier, and managing the contract.	Request for proposal/tender, contract/agreement, acceptance criteria, acceptance record.
Supply	The supplier's activities in responding to an acquisition, proposing, and delivering the product or service under the agreement.	Proposal/bid, project management plan, delivered product/service against the contract.
Development	The technical activities that transform requirements into a software product — analysis, architecture, design, coding, integration, and qualification testing.	Requirements specification, architecture/design documents, source code, test plans and results, user documentation.
Operation	Executing the software in its production environment and providing operational support to users.	Operational procedures, user support/help-desk records, operating environment configuration records.
Maintenance	Managing changes to the delivered software to correct faults, improve performance, or adapt it to a changed environment, while controlling the impact of each change.	Problem/change reports, maintenance plan, updated releases and their release notes.
Retirement (destruction)	Formally withdrawing the software from active use, including data migration/archival and secure disposal of the software and its data.	Retirement/decommissioning plan, data archival or migration record, disposal certificate/record.

Topic: ISO/IEC 12207's six primary life-cycle processes and the supporting/organizational processes that run underneath them.

Key relations: Primary processes = Acquisition → Supply → Development → Operation → Maintenance → Retirement, each producing defined deliverables and involving a specific party (acquirer/supplier/developer/operator/maintainer).

Why this works: unlike a single-project process model (Questions 1–3), ISO/IEC 12207 scopes the ENTIRE system life, including the two organizational processes (acquisition, supply) that establish the contractual relationship before any development activity begins, and the two that continue long after any one development project ends (operation, maintenance, eventual retirement) — it is a standard for the software's whole life, not just its build.

Common pitfall: conflating ISO/IEC 12207's "development" process with a specific process model (Waterfall/agile/etc.) — 12207 defines WHAT activities and deliverables the development process must produce; it deliberately does not mandate HOW they are sequenced, which is exactly the choice a project makes when it selects a process model from Questions 1–3.

Source: ISO/IEC/IEEE 12207:2017, Systems and software engineering — Software life cycle processes; Sommerville, Software Engineering, 10th ed., Ch. 25 (Configuration Management, referencing 12207's supporting processes).

Question 5 of 8

Question 5 (10 marks)