It is important to understand the change that has taken place in terms of application development life cycles in order to understand application transformation. When the pace of change was slow, application development always had a pre-determined plan with a finite end goal. The design of the application was thought through and agreed up-front, including capturing all of the user's requirements. Then, a series of steps followed that involved developing the plan, testing the functionality of the application, testing whether the application would run efficiently and to the right scale (non-functional testing), user acceptance testing to agree that the application had been built the way it was supposed to be, before finally going live in its final format.
The pace of change in some modern applications, coupled with the fact that they can be...
