Software Processes

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Topics covered

✧ Software process models

✧ Process activities

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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
▪ Reuse covered in more depth in Chapter 15.

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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
✧ Loss of control over evolution of reused system elements

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Process activities

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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.
✧ For example, in the waterfall model, they are organized
in sequence, whereas in incremental development they
are interleaved.

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The requirements engineering process

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Software specification

✧ The process of establishing what services are required

and the constraints on the system’s operation and
development.
✧ Requirements engineering process
▪ 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

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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.

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A general model of the design process

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Design activities

✧ Architectural design, where you identify the overall

structure of the system, the principal components
(subsystems or modules), their relationships and how
they are distributed.
✧ Database design, where you design the system data
structures and how these are to be represented in a
database.
✧ Interface design, where you define the interfaces
between system components.
✧ Component selection and design, where you search for
reusable components. If unavailable, you design how it
will operate.
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System implementation

✧ The software is implemented either by developing a

program or programs or by configuring an application
system.
✧ Design and implementation are interleaved activities for
most types of software system.
✧ Programming is an individual activity with no standard
process.
✧ Debugging is the activity of finding program faults and
correcting these faults.

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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.

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Stages of testing

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Testing stages

✧ 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.
✧ Customer testing
▪ Testing with customer data to check that the system meets the
customer’s needs.

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Testing phases in a plan-driven software
process (V-model)

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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.

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System evolution

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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.

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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.

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Incremental delivery

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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.

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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.

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