What is a Predictive Life Cycle (Waterfall)?
A predictive (plan-driven, waterfall) life cycle fixes scope, schedule, and cost early, then executes phase by phase — requirements → design → build → test → deliver. Change is possible but controlled and priced; the model's bet is that upfront planning is cheaper than midstream rework.
It excels where requirements are stable and the cost of change is brutal: construction, hardware, regulated work. Its failure mode is discovering in month eleven that the users needed something else in month two.
Worked example
Nobody builds a suspension bridge iteratively — you can't "refactor" foundations under load. The design is complete, checked, and approved before the first pile is driven, because a requirements change during construction costs thousands of times what it cost on paper. That cost asymmetry is the entire argument for predictive.