What is an Adaptive Life Cycle (Agile)?
An adaptive (agile, change-driven) life cycle fixes time and cost into short iterations and lets scope flex: build a small increment, show it, learn, reprioritize, repeat. The bet is the mirror image of predictive's — that early requirements are guesses, so cheap frequent feedback beats expensive upfront certainty.
It excels where uncertainty is high and change is cheap (software, product design). Signature exam words: iterations, increments, frequent feedback, evolving requirements, prioritized backlog.
Worked example
A startup building a nutrition app ships a bare version to 200 users in week four. The roadmap's star feature — meal-photo logging — goes unused, while the throwaway barcode scanner drives daily retention. Two-thirds of the original backlog dies unbuilt, and the product is better for it. In a predictive plan, that discovery would have cost a year.