2.2 — Systems Life Cycle

CCDV-F Domain 2 · Task 2.2

What You Need to Know

Canonical phases and what they own:

1. Planning and requirements
2. Design
3. Development
4. Testing — designing the regression eval set (derived from requirements, not reverse-engineered from incidents)
5. Implementation and deployment — the cutover plan that swaps pilot for production (happens once)
6. Operations and maintenance — standing cost-per-task dashboard, error triage, prompt fixes, plan for moving off a deprecated model (recurs for the life of the system)
7. Retirement — switching off and disposing of logs; data disposition is part of this phase

Cadence Changes, Concerns Do Not

Agile, iterative and plan-driven frameworks all contain the same concerns. Claude applications push cadence to the fast extreme: change a prompt, run evals, release. Each turn changes behaviour, so the eval suite is the recurring test phase.

The Deprecation Clock

Active → Legacy → Deprecated → Retired. A deprecated model still works but is no longer recommended; Anthropic gives a recommended replacement and a retirement date. Publicly released models get at least 60 days’ notice. Once deprecated, migrate before retirement. Dates bind Anthropic-operated platforms; Bedrock and Google Cloud (Google managed) set their own schedules.

Migration runbook: (1) re-run eval suite against the replacement; (2) roll out through normal release; (3) audit which keys still call the old model.

Key Concept: Once the system is live, prompt changes ride the operations loop with evals as the gate. Do not file them under development.

Exam Traps

• Placing the cutover plan in operations because it governs how the production service starts operating
• Assuming deprecation dates are uniform across every platform that serves Claude models
• Designing the eval suite in response to a production incident and calling that the testing phase