University of Information Technology

Software
Engineering

Lecture: MSc. Nguyen Thi Thanh Truc

Email: [email protected]

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Evaluation

 Mid-term Test: 20% present 30% (practice)

▪ quizzes, short essays, presentations, exercises
 Final test : 50%
 For practice
▪ Analysis + Design + Develop + Test software (document +
demo)
▪ Implement Environment: Visual Basic or VC++, VB.Net , C#,
Java, DB (SQL server or Access)

2
 University of Information Technology

Chapter 2 – Software Processes

Lecture: MSc. Nguyen Thi Thanh Truc

Email: [email protected]

Chapter 2 Software Processes 3

Brainstorming …

Chapter 2 Software Processes 4

RBAC system for Company Z.

 - (RQ1) An employee plays 1 or more role(s) according to her/his job

 - (RQ2) System can access the company’s centralized database
 - (RQ3) System to determine whether an employee is allowed to
enter a particular room/hall
 - (RQ4) System can control door locking devices
 - (RQ5) System to allow 2-3 administrators to edit the access rights
of all employees using Web with good UI.
 - (RQ6) System could report arriving/leaving time of an employee
each day
 - (RQ7) System will get a signal if locking devices are tempered
with. It may then alert people responsible.

Chapter 2 Software Processes 5

Quiz...

 What software activity did I do in the previous slide?

 I inserted my employee card into a door-locking device.
The corresponding door opened as it should. I reported
this to the project manager. What software activity did I
do?
 Supposed I have built a database system and a Web
page that allows the admins to edit the access rights of
all employees. What software activity I have done?

Chapter 2 Software Processes 6

Processes?

 - Challenge #1
▪ Spec? Design? Coding?
 - Challenge #2
▪ Want to test if we can programmatically control the door-locking
devices (e.g., via drivers) before the system may be built.
▪ Want to build a good GUI for administrators and get feedback
from them
 - Challenge #3
▪ How to deal with changes (e.g., upgrading door-locking devices,
adding more features to the admin function)

Chapter 2 Software Processes 7

Want to develop the RBAC system?

 Step by step, sequential, will it work?

 An alternative way: let’s iterate

Chapter 2 Software Processes 8

 How to split the requirements of the RBAC system into
sub-projects

Chapter 2 Software Processes 9

Software development

 Goal: What are we trying to produce?

WebPortal
GRANT

 Software development process – how we achieve our

goal
 Demo

10
 Software Development Process
- How we achieve our goal
Oct Nov Dec Jan Feb Mar
20017 20017 20017 20017 20017 20018

Project Effective Start

Start Date for Who?

Analysis and
Software
Design Development Testing Deployment
Requirements
Gathering

11
 Theory that follows

Chapter 2 Software Processes 12

 Topics covered

 Software process models

 Process activities
 Coping with change
 The Rational Unified Process
▪ An example of a modern software process.
 Reading Chapter 1
▪ Professional software development
• What is meant by software engineering.
▪ Software engineering ethics
• A brief introduction to ethical issues that affect software engineering.
 Suggested student projects
▪ A brief introduction to each suggested project that can be carried out by
students for this course
Chapter 2 Software Processes 13
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.
Chapter 2 Software Processes 14
Software process descriptions

 Process
▪ 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.

Chapter 2 Software Processes 15

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.
Chapter 2 Software Processes 16
The waterfall model

Chapter 2 Software Processes 17

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.

Chapter 2 Software Processes 18

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.

Chapter 2 Software Processes 19

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.
Chapter 2 Software Processes 21
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.

Chapter 2 Software Processes 22

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.

Chapter 2 Software Processes 23

Reuse-oriented software engineering

Chapter 2 Software Processes 24

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.

Chapter 2 Software Processes 25

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.

Chapter 2 Software Processes 26

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

Chapter 2 Software Processes 27

The requirements engineering process

Chapter 2 Software Processes 28

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.

Chapter 2 Software Processes 29

A general model of the design process

Chapter 2 Software Processes 30

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.
Chapter 2 Software Processes 31
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.

Chapter 2 Software Processes 32

Meaning of V & V

 Verification
▪ Are we building the thing right
 Validation
▪ Are you building the right thing

Chapter 2 Software Processes 33

Stages of testing

Chapter 2 Software Processes 34

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.

Chapter 2 Software Processes 35

Testing phases in a plan-driven software
process

Chapter 2 Software Processes 36

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.

Chapter 2 Software Processes 37

System evolution

Chapter 2 Software Processes 38

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

Chapter 2 Software Processes 39

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.

Chapter 2 Software Processes 40

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.

Chapter 2 Software Processes 41

Benefits of prototyping

 Improved system usability.

 A closer match to users’ real needs.
 Improved design quality.
 Improved maintainability.
 Reduced development effort.

Chapter 2 Software Processes 42

The process of prototype development

Chapter 2 Software Processes 43

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

Chapter 2 Software Processes 44

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.

Chapter 2 Software Processes 45

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.

Chapter 2 Software Processes 46

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.

Chapter 2 Software Processes 47

Incremental delivery

Chapter 2 Software Processes 48

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.

Chapter 2 Software Processes 49

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.

Chapter 2 Software Processes 50

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.

Chapter 2 Software Processes 51

Boehm’s spiral model of the software process

Chapter 2 Software Processes 52

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.

Chapter 2 Software Processes 53

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.

Chapter 2 Software Processes 54

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.

Chapter 2 Software Processes 55

Phases in the Rational Unified Process

Chapter 2 Software Processes 56

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.

Chapter 2 Software Processes 57

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.

Chapter 2 Software Processes 58

Unified Process Matrix

Chapter 2 Software Processes 59

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.

Chapter 2 Software Processes 60

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 (see
change management Chapter 25).
Project management This supporting workflow manages the system development (see
Chapters 22 and 23).
Environment This workflow is concerned with making appropriate software
tools available to the software development team.

Chapter 2 Software Processes 61

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.

Chapter 2 Software Processes 62

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.

Chapter 2 Software Processes 63

Project Documents

Chapter 2 Software Processes 64

The Capability Maturity Model (CMM)

 5 levels
 Currently CMMI (CMM integration)
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability_Maturity_Model_In
tegration

Chapter 2 Software Processes 65

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.

Chapter 2 Software Processes 66

Key points

 Requirement 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.
Chapter 2 Software Processes 67
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.

Chapter 2 Software Processes 68

Homework

Customer-driven

Market-driven
 In thinking about the process of developing
software
 Who is involved? What roles do individuals have?
 How many individuals are involved?
 What are the tasks?
 How are tasks allocated to people?
 What are the characteristics of those engaged in a given task?
 Is the a match between the characteristics of the individual and the
demands of the task?
 How is the process managed, coordinated, controlled?
 What are the work products produced during development?
 How long do the various tasks take?
 How do we know a task is complete?
 Are there tasks that can be performed concurrently?
 What communications support is required to facilitate people working
together?
In thinking about the product resulting
from the development activity
 What is the functionality provided?
 What are the intended use(s) of the product in the customer's
environment?
 What expectations does the customer have for the product?
 Is the product operating reasonably in the use environment?
 What considerations are there for system reliability?
 How will the product be maintained over time?
 What performance characteristics do the various functions need?
 How does the system interface with the users?
 Are the resources involved with system use being used wisely?
 How many defects are present in the product?
 What quality attributes have been assigned to this product and
how should they be quantified?