LIVE projects is a term much used, abused and misused but little understood by students and academicians alike. To understand the true meaning of LIVE project one needs to first decipher how a real life software development exercise differs from a lab situation.

Today computers are becoming key elements influencing our daily lives in a number of ways. We cannot imagine several applications such as banking, financial transactions, manufacturing, defence, process control, communication etc without the use of computers in some way. Computers, per se, are dumb pieces of hardware. It is the software that gives life to them. With the near total control of our lives by computers, any malfunctioning in either the hardware or the software will lead to disastrous consequences. While it is relatively easy to ensure reliability of hardware components by stringent quality measures in the manufacturing process, the same cannot be said of software. Though software development process is still not an exact science, it is imperative that software always behaves in a predictable manner. Therefore it is necessary that software in the real world is developed through a well defined and systematic process.