Software process models

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Software process models

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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.
✧ Integration and configuration
– The system is assembled from existing configurable 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.

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The waterfall model

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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.
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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.

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Incremental development

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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.
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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.

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Integration and configuration
✧ Based on software reuse where systems are integrated from
existing components or application systems (sometimes
called COTS -Commercial-off-the-shelf) systems).
✧ Reused elements may be configured to adapt their behaviour
and functionality to a user’s requirements
✧ Reuse is now the standard approach for building many types
of business system

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Types of reusable software
✧ Stand-alone application systems (sometimes called
COTS) that are configured for use in a particular
environment.
✧ Collections of objects that are developed as a package to
be integrated with a component framework such as .NET
or J2EE.
✧ Web services that are developed according to service
standards and which are available for remote invocation.
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Reuse-oriented software engineering

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Key process stages
✧ Requirements specification
✧ Software discovery and evaluation
✧ Requirements refinement
✧ Application system configuration
✧ Component adaptation and integration
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Advantages and disadvantages
✧ Reduced costs and risks as less software is developed
from scratch
✧ Faster delivery and deployment of system
✧ But requirements compromises are inevitable so
system may not meet real needs of users
✧ Lossof control over evolution of reused system
elements
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Key points
✧ Software processes are the activities involved in
producing a software system. Software process models
are abstract representations of these processes.
✧ Generalprocess models describe the organization of
software processes.
– Examples of these general models include the ‘waterfall’
model, incremental development, and reuse-oriented
development, prototyping and spiral models.
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