Chapter 2 – Software Processes

Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Software Engineering Overview 1 / 23

 The software process

Outline

1 The software process

• Plan-driven and agile processes

Software process models

• The waterfall model
• Incremental development
• Reuse-oriented software engineering
Types of software component
• Basic Process activities

Software Engineering Overview 2 / 23

Outline

1 Coping with change

• Change avoidance and Change tolerance

Software prototype
• Prototype development
• Throw-away prototypes
Incremental development and delivery
•

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 The software process
Plan-driven and agile processes

The software process

 A process is a collection of activities, actions, and tasks that are
performed when some work product is to be created.

 Software process is splitting of software development work into

distinct phases (or stages) containing different activities.

 A structured set of activities required to develop a software system.

Software Engineering Overview

 The software process
Plan-driven and agile processes

The software process

cont..

 Many different software processes but all involve:

• Specification – defining what the system should do;
• Design and implementation – defining the organization of the
system and implementing the system
• Validation – checking that it does what the customer wants;
• Evolution – changing the system in response to changing
customer needs.

Software Engineering Overview

 The software process
Plan-driven and agile processes

Software process descriptions

 When we describe and discuss processes, we usually talk about the

activities in these processes such as specifying a data model,
designing a user interface, etc. and the ordering of these activities.

 Process descriptions may also include:

• Products, which are the outcomes of a process activity;

• Roles, which reflect the responsibilities of the people involved in
the process;
• Pre- and post-conditions, which are statements that are true
before and after a process activity has been enacted or a product
produced.

Software Engineering Overview

 The software process
Plan-driven and agile processes

Plan-driven and agile processes

 Plan-driven processes are processes where all of the process

activities are planned in advance and progress is measured against
this plan.

 In agile processes, planning is incremental and it is easier to change the

process to reflect changing customer requirements.

 In practice, most practical processes include elements of both plan-driven

and agile approaches.
 There are no right or wrong software processes.

Software Engineering Overview

 The software process
Plan-driven and agile processes

Software process models

 The waterfall model

• Plan-driven model. Separate and distinct phases of specification
and development.
 Incremental development
• Specification, development and validation are interleaved. May
be plan-driven or agile.
 Reuse-oriented software engineering
• The system is assembled from existing components. May be
plan-driven or agile.
 In practice, most large systems are developed using a process that
incorporates elements from all of these models.

Software Engineering Overview

 The software process
Plan-driven and agile processes

The waterfall model

Software Engineering Overview

 The software process
Plan-driven and agile processes

Waterfall model phases

 There are separate identified phases in the waterfall model:

• Requirements analysis and definition

• System and software design
• Implementation and unit testing
• Integration and system testing
• Operation and maintenance

 The main drawback of the waterfall model is the difficulty of

accommodating change after the process is underway. In principle, a
phase has to be complete before moving onto the next phase.

Software Engineering Overview

 The software process
Plan-driven and agile processes

Waterfall model problems

 Inflexible partitioning of the project into distinct stages makes it difficult to

respond to changing customer requirements.

• Therefore, this model is only appropriate when the

requirements are well-understood and changes will be fairly
limited during the design process.
• Few business systems have stable requirements.

 The waterfall model is mostly used for large systems engineering

projects where a system is developed at several sites.

 In those circumstances, the plan-driven nature of the waterfall model

helps coordinate the work.

Software Engineering Overview

 The software process
Plan-driven and agile processes

Incremental development

Software Engineering Overview

 The software process
Plan-driven and agile processes

Incremental development benefits

 The cost of accommodating changing customer requirements is reduced.

• The amount of analysis and documentation that has to be redone

is much less than is required with the waterfall model.
 It is easier to get customer feedback on the development work that has
been done.

• Customers can comment on demonstrations of the software and

see how much has been implemented.
 More rapid delivery and deployment of useful software to the customer is
possible.

• Customers are able to use and gain value from the software earlier
than is possible with a waterfall process.

Software Engineering Overview

 The software process
Plan-driven and agile processes

Incremental development problems

 The process is not visible.

• Managers need regular deliverables to measure progress. If

systems are developed quickly, it is not cost-effective to produce
documents that reflect every version of the system.

 System structure tends to degrade as new increments are added.

• Unless time and money is spent on refactoring to improve the

software, regular change tends to corrupt its structure
• Incorporating further software changes becomes increasingly
difficult and costly.

Software Engineering Overview

 The software process
Plan-driven and agile processes

Reuse-oriented software engineering

 Based on systematic reuse where systems are integrated from existing

components or COTS (Commercial-off-the-shelf) systems.

 Process stages
• Component analysis;
• Requirements modification;
• System design with reuse;
• Development and integration.

 Reuse is now the standard approach for building many types of business
system

Software Engineering Overview

 The software process
Plan-driven and agile processes

Reuse-oriented software engineering

Software Engineering Overview

 The software process
Plan-driven and agile processes

Types of software component

 Web services that are developed according to service standards and which
are available for remote invocation.

 Collections of objects that are developed as a package to be integrated

with a component framework such as .NET or J2EE.

 Stand-alone software systems (COTS) that are configured for use in a

particular environment.

Software Engineering Overview

 The software process
Plan-driven and agile processes

Process activities

 Real software processes are inter-leaved sequences of

• technical,
• collaborative and
• managerial activities
 with the overall goal of
• specifying,
• designing,
• implementing and
• testing a software system.

 The four basic process activities of specification, development,

validation and evolution are organized differently in different
development processes.
 In the waterfall model, they are organized in sequence, whereas in
incremental development they are inter-leaved.
Software Engineering Overview
 The software process
Plan-driven and agile processes

Process activities
Cont..

 There are four basic process activities.

1. Software specification
2. Software design and implementation
3. Software validation
4. Software evolution

Software Engineering Overview

 The software process
Plan-driven and agile processes

Process activities
Cont..
1. Software Specification

 Software specification or requirements engineering is the process

of understanding and defining what services are required from the
system and identifying the constraints on the system’s operation and
development.

Software Engineering Overview

 The software process
Plan-driven and agile processes

Process activities
Cont..

 Requirements engineering process

 Feasibility study
• Is it technically and financially feasible to build the
system?
 Requirements elicitation and analysis
• What do the system stakeholders require or expect
from the system?
 Requirements specification
• Defining the requirements in detail
 Requirements validation
• Checking the validity of the requirements

Software Engineering Overview

 The software process
Plan-driven and agile processes

Process activities
Cont..

 Requirements engineering process

Software Engineering Overview

 The software process
Plan-driven and agile processes

Process activities
Cont..
2. Software design and implementation
 The process of converting the system specification into an executable
system.

 Software design
• Design a software structure that realises the specification;

 Implementation
• Translate this structure into an executable program;

Software Engineering Overview

 The software process
Plan-driven and agile processes

Process activities
Cont..
A general model of the design process

Software Engineering Overview

 The software process
Plan-driven and agile processes

Process activities
Cont..
Design activities

 Architectural design: where you identify the overall structure of the

system, the principal components (sometimes called sub-systems or
modules), their relationships and how they are distributed.

 Interface design: where you define the interfaces between system

components.

 Component design: where you take each system component and

design how it will operate.

 Database design: where you design the system data structures and
how these are to be represented in a database.

Software Engineering Overview

 The software process
Plan-driven and agile processes

Process activities
Cont..
3. Software validation
 Verification and validation (V & V) is intended to show that a system
conforms to its specification and meets the requirements of the system
customer.

 Involves checking and review processes and system testing.

 System testing involves executing the system with test cases that are
derived from the specification of the real data to be processed by the
system.

 Testing is the most commonly used V & V activity.

Software Engineering Overview

 The software process
Plan-driven and agile processes

Process activities
Cont..
Stages of testing

Software Engineering Overview

 The software process
Plan-driven and agile processes

Process activities
Cont..
Testing stages

 Development or component testing

• Individual components are tested independently;
• Components may be functions or objects or coherent groupings of
these entities.

 System testing
• Testing of the system as a whole. Testing of emergent properties
is particularly important.

 Acceptance testing
• Testing with customer data to check that the system meets the
customer’s needs.

Software Engineering Overview

 The software process
Plan-driven and agile processes

Process activities
Cont..
Testing phases in a plan-driven software process

Software Engineering Overview

 The software process
Plan-driven and agile processes

Process activities
Cont..
4. Software evolution
 Software is inherently flexible and can change.

 As requirements change through changing business circumstances,

the software that supports the business must also evolve and
change.

 Although there has been a difference between development and

evolution (maintenance) this is increasingly irrelevant as fewer and
fewer systems are completely new.

Software Engineering Overview

 The software process
Plan-driven and agile processes

Process activities
Cont..
System evolution

Software Engineering Overview

Coping with change

 Change is inevitable in all large software projects.

• Business changes lead to new and changed system

requirements
• New technologies open up new possibilities for improving
implementations
• Changing platforms require application changes

 Change leads to rework so the costs of change include both rework (e.g.
re-analysing requirements) as well as the costs of implementing new
functionality
 Coping with change
cont..
 Two strategies to reduce the costs of rework:
• Change avoidance and Change tolerance
 Change avoidance: where the software process includes activities that can
anticipate possible changes before significant rework is required.

• For example, a prototype system may be developed to show some

key features of the system to customers.

 Change tolerance: where the process is designed so that changes can be

accommodated at relatively low cost.

• This normally involves some form of incremental development.

• Proposed changes may be implemented in increments that have not
yet been developed.
• If this is impossible, then only a single increment (a small part of the
system) may have be altered to incorporate the change.
Software prototyping

 A prototype is an initial version of a system used to demonstrate concepts

and try out design options.

 A prototype can be used in:

• The requirements engineering process to help with requirements

elicitation and validation;

• In design processes to explore options and develop a UI design;

• In the testing process to run back-to-back tests.

Software prototyping
Cont…
Benefits of prototyping

 Improved system usability.

 A closer match to users’ real needs.

 Improved design quality.

 Improved maintainability.

 Reduced development effort.

Software prototyping
Cont…
The process of prototype development
 Software prototyping
Cont…
Prototype development

 May be based on rapid prototyping languages or tools

 May involve leaving out functionality

• Prototype should focus on areas of the product that are not well-
understood;

• Error checking and recovery may not be included in the prototype;

 Software prototyping
Cont…
Throw-away prototypes

 Prototypes should be discarded after development as they are not a good

basis for a production system:

• It may be impossible to tune the system to meet non-functional

requirements;
• Prototypes are normally undocumented;
• The prototype structure is usually degraded through rapid change;
• The prototype probably will not meet normal organizational quality
standards.
Incremental development and delivery

 Rather than deliver the system as a single delivery, the development and
delivery is broken down into increments with each increment delivering part
of the required functionality.

 User requirements are prioritized and the highest priority requirements are
included in early increments.

 Once the development of an increment is started, the requirements are

frozen though requirements for later increments can continue to evolve.
Incremental development and delivery
Cont…

 Incremental development
• Develop the system in increments and evaluate each increment
before proceeding to the development of the next increment;
• Normal approach used in agile methods;
• Evaluation done by user/customer proxy.

 Incremental delivery
• Deploy an increment for use by end-users;
• More realistic evaluation about practical use of software;
• Difficult to implement for replacement systems as increments have
less functionality than the system being replaced.
Incremental development and delivery
Cont…
Incremental development and delivery
Cont…

Incremental delivery advantages

 Customer value can be delivered with each increment so system

functionality is available earlier.

 Early increments act as a prototype to help elicit requirements for

later increments.

 Lower risk of overall project failure.

 The highest priority system services tend to receive the most

testing.
Incremental development and delivery
Cont…

Incremental delivery problems

 Most systems require a set of basic facilities that are used by different
parts of the system.
• As requirements are not defined in detail until an increment is to be
implemented, it can be hard to identify common facilities that are
needed by all increments.
 The essence of iterative processes is that the specification is developed in
conjunction with the software.
• However, this conflicts with the procurement model of many
organizations, where the complete system specification is part of
the system development contract.
Incremental development and delivery
Cont…

Incremental delivery problems

 Most systems require a set of basic facilities that are used by different
parts of the system.
• As requirements are not defined in detail until an increment is to be
implemented, it can be hard to identify common facilities that are
needed by all increments.
 The essence of iterative processes is that the specification is developed in
conjunction with the software.
• However, this conflicts with the procurement model of many
organizations, where the complete system specification is part of
the system development contract.