Chapter 2 – Software Processes

Lecture 1

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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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1. 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.
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(a) 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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(b) 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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(c) 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.
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Reuse-oriented software engineering

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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
(i) Specification
(ii) Development
(iii) Validation
(iv) Evolution

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(i) 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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(ii) 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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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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(iii) 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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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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(iv) 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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Chapter 2 – Software Processes

Lecture 2

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(iii) COPYING 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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(IV) RATIONAL UNIFIED PROCESS(RUP)

 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.

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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 (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.

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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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