I've been with my current company for about four months now and I've noticed how several of our RnD scopes/documents use the term "lifecycle testing."
I've always thought that this term would mean the entire testing phase of a project, but the context of the term suggests that it instead is when the software is tested with "live" or "real" data in a staging environment as close to the production environment as possible.
This has led me to wonder if I have misunderstood the meaning of the phrase, in which case, can somebody explain what lifecycle testing is supposed to be or mean?
A lifecycle of software is it's behaviour in the following situations:
Lifecycle testing is very important for server applications, where it's especially focussed on "mid-life" (it's not an official term btw). Server apps may never crash while doing something importantly, and if they do: they shouldn't bring down the complete system.
The clue "lifetime" of being "live" or "real" isn't much true, it's more being "alive" than "live".
For instance; I've build a Flash client-application which is a "billboard" application, displayed at a large screen, and I am lifecycle-testing it: