Lecture 2 – Software Processes

Part 1
 Topics covered
• Software process models
• Process activities
• Coping with change
• 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:
 System and software design
 Implementation Requirements analysis and definition
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-oriented software engineering
 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.
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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
 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
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The requirements engineering process

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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
(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.
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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
• 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.

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Testing phases in a plan-driven software process

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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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 Key points
• Software processes are the activities involved in
producing a software system. Software process
models are abstract representations of these
processes.
• General process models describe the organization
of software processes.
• Examples of these general models include the
‘waterfall’ model, incremental development, and
reuse-oriented development.

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 Key points
• Requirements engineering is the process of developing a
software specification.
• Design and implementation processes are concerned
with transforming a requirements specification into an
executable software system.
• Software validation is the process of checking that the
system conforms to its specification and that it meets
the real needs of the users of the system.
• Software evolution takes place when you change
existing software systems to meet new requirements.
The software must evolve to remain useful.

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Lecture 2 – Software Processes

Part 2

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 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

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 Reducing the costs of rework
• 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.

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 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.

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

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The process of prototype development

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 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

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 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.

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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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 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.

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Boehm’s spiral model of the software process

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 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.
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 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.

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 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 practive perspective that suggests good practice.

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Phases in the Rational Unified Process

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 RUP phases
• Inception
Establish the business case for the system.
• Elaboration
Develop an understanding of the problem domain
and the system architecture.
• Construction
System design, programming and testing.
• Transition
Deploy the system in its operating environment.

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 RUP iteration
• In-phase iteration
Each phase is iterative with results developed
incrementally.
• Cross-phase iteration
As shown by the loop in the RUP model, the whole
set of phases may be enacted incrementally.

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Static workflows in the Rational Unified Process
Workflow Description

Business modelling The business processes are modelled using business

use cases.
Requirements Actors who interact with the system are identified and
use cases are developed to model the system
requirements.

Analysis and design A design model is created and documented using

architectural models, component models, object
models and sequence models.

Implementation The components in the system are implemented and

structured into implementation sub-systems.
Automatic code generation from design models helps
accelerate this process.

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 Static workflows in the Rational Unified
Process
Workflow Description
Testing Testing is an iterative process that is carried out in conjunction
with implementation. System testing follows the completion of
the implementation.

Deployment A product release is created, distributed to users and installed in

their workplace.
Configuration and This supporting workflow managed changes to the system
change management
Project management This supporting workflow manages the system development .
Environment This workflow is concerned with making appropriate software
tools available to the software development team.

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 RUP good practice
• Develop software iteratively
Plan increments based on customer priorities and
deliver highest priority increments first.
• Manage requirements
Explicitly document customer requirements and
keep track of changes to these requirements.
• Use component-based architectures
Organize the system architecture as a set of
reusable components.

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 RUP good practice
• Visually model software
Use graphical UML models to present static and
dynamic views of the software.
• Verify software quality
Ensure that the software meet’s organizational
quality standards.
• Control changes to software
Manage software changes using a change
management system and configuration
management tools.

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 Key points
• Processes should include activities to cope with
change. This may involve a prototyping phase that
helps avoid poor decisions on requirements and
design.
• Processes may be structured for iterative
development and delivery so that changes may be
made without disrupting the system as a whole.
• The Rational Unified Process is a modern generic
process model that is organized into phases
(inception, elaboration, construction and transition)
but separates activities (requirements, analysis and
design, etc.) from these phases.
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