CompTIA Cloud+ Practice Test

What term describes the management of a software application from planning through retirement?

1. Version management

2. Change management

3. Life cycle management

4. Service management

The correct answer is: Life cycle management

The term that best describes the management of a software application from its initial planning stages through to its retirement is life cycle management. This concept encompasses all phases of an application's existence, including planning, development, deployment, maintenance, and eventual retirement or decommissioning. Life cycle management is crucial because it ensures that strategies and practices are in place for optimizing the application at each stage, thereby enhancing overall efficiency, performance, and sustainability. It includes considerations for cost management, resource allocation, and compliance throughout the lifetime of the application. While version management focuses specifically on tracking changes and updates to software versions, change management deals primarily with the process of managing changes in a structured way to minimize impact on service quality. Service management generally refers to the broader context of delivering and managing IT services, rather than the specific life cycle of a software application. Each of these concepts plays a role in software management but does not cover the complete journey from inception to retirement in the same comprehensive manner that life cycle management does.