Software lifecycle notes — GOALS, waterfall, and verification vs validation

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0400

These pages are from a software engineering textbook I used in coursework. I grouped the figures here as a single reference: goal-oriented planning, how the waterfall model sequences activities (with verification and validation paired to each phase), an incremental variant, the textbook’s list of life-cycle subgoals, a reminder that method advice depends on context, and a short ethics passage about impact on people.

GOALS approach (Figure 3-1)

The GOALS flowchart is a top-down pattern: set overall life-cycle goals (functions, constraints, schedule, usability, maintainability), analyze the problem and sketch solution structure, separate concerns into subgoals, develop solutions for each subgoal in parallel where possible, then validate those solutions against the other goals and iterate until the decision “all goals satisfied?” is yes.

My journey in software engineering

Sat, 30 Dec 2023 10:00:00 -0400

This site’s bio sums up the slice of the field I care about most: backend, platform, and DevSecOps. This post is a longer look at how I think about that journey — not a timeline of jobs, but the ideas that kept showing up once I stopped treating “shipping features” as the only scoreboard.

From features to systems

Early on, progress often feels linear: tickets closed, endpoints added, screens shipped. That work matters. Over time, though, the interesting problems sit one level up: how services talk to each other, how failures propagate, how a change in one team’s repo affects everyone else on Monday morning. Backend engineering stops being “write the handler” and becomes “design something that stays understandable when you’re not in the room.”

Software Engineering on Antoine Boucher

Software lifecycle notes — GOALS, waterfall, and verification vs validation

GOALS approach (Figure 3-1)

My journey in software engineering

From features to systems