DE LA SALLE UNIVERSITY-DASMARIÑAS

COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING, ARCHITECTURE, AND TECHNOLOGY

ENGINEERING DEPARTMENT
COMPUTER ENGINEERING PROGRAM

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING

(T-CPET423)

Module 2 – Software Process Model

Prayer:

Thank you God for all the things you've made our world to be.
For every single living plant, insect, bird and tree.

Thank you God for all the people you have placed around us.
For every single parent, friend and teacher that we trust.

Thank you Lord for all the gifts you send to us each day.
For every single meal and snack, for cuddles, toys and play.

Thank you God for caring for us, we know you always see,
Our every need, our worries, cares, our laughter, joys and tears.

Thank you Lord that you're our friend, you delight in all we do,
Especially when you hear our prayers, and we give thanks to you.

Amen.

Learning Outcome

 TLO1. Discuss the Software process models and pprocess activities

 TLO2 Explain the Rational Unified Process
The software process
 A structured set of activities required to develop a
software system.
 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.
 A software process model is an abstract representation of a process. It presents a
description of a process from some particular perspective.
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.

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 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.

The waterfall model

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.

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.

Incremental development
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.

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.

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
 Reuse covered in more depth in Chapter 16.

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.

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 specification
 The process of establishing what services are required and the constraints on the system’s
operation and development.
 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

The requirements engineering process

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.
 The activities of design and implementation are closely related and may be inter-leaved.

A general model of the design process

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 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.

Stages of testing
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.

Testing phases in a plan-driven software process

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

System evolution
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.

Benefits of prototyping
 Improved system usability.
 A closer match to users’ real needs.
 Improved design quality.
 Improved maintainability.
 Reduced development effort.

The process of prototype development

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;
 Focus on functional rather than non-functional requirements such as reliability
and security
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 organisational quality standards.

Incremental 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 prioritised 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

 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 delivery
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 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.
Boehm’s spiral model
 Process is represented as a spiral rather than as a sequence of activities with backtracking.
 Each loop in the spiral represents a phase in the process.
 No fixed phases such as specification or design - loops in the spiral are chosen depending
on what is required.
 Risks are explicitly assessed and resolved throughout the process.

Boehm’s spiral model of the software process

Spiral model sectors

 Objective setting
 Specific objectives for the phase are identified.
 Risk assessment and reduction
 Risks are assessed and activities put in place to reduce the key risks.
 Development and validation
 A development model for the system is chosen which can be any of the generic
models.
 Planning
 The project is reviewed and the next phase of the spiral is planned.

Spiral model usage

 Spiral model has been very influential in helping people think about iteration in software
processes and introducing the risk-driven approach to development.
 In practice, however, the model is rarely used as published for practical software
development.

The Rational Unified Process

 A modern generic process derived from the work on the UML and associated process.
 Brings together aspects of the 3 generic process models discussed previously.
 Normally described from 3 perspectives
 A dynamic perspective that shows phases over time;
  A static perspective that shows process activities.
 A proactive perspective that suggests good practice.

Assessment Task

1. Discuss the prototype development process. Minimum of 10 sentences. (10 Points)

2. Explain the Boehm’s spiral model. Minimum of 15 sentences. (10 Points)