Chapter 1 continued…

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Software engineering diversity

 There are many different types of software system and there is no universal
set of software techniques that is applicable to all of these.
 The software engineering methods and tools used depend on the type of
application being developed, the requirements of the customer and the
background of the development team.

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Application types

 Stand-alone applications
 These are application systems that run on a local computer, such as a PC. They include
all necessary functionality and do not need to be connected to a network.
 Interactive transaction-based applications
 Applications that execute on a remote computer and are accessed by users from their
own PCs or terminals. These include web applications such as e-commerce applications.
 Embedded control systems
 These are software control systems that control and manage hardware devices.
Numerically, there are probably more embedded systems than any other type of system.

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Application types

 Batch processing systems

 These are business systems that are designed to process data in large batches. They
process large numbers of individual inputs to create corresponding outputs.
 Entertainment systems
 These are systems that are primarily for personal use and which are intended to
entertain the user.
 Systems for modeling and simulation
 These are systems that are developed by scientists and engineers to model physical
processes or situations, which include many, separate, interacting objects.

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Application types

 Data collection systems

 These are systems that collect data from their environment using a set of sensors and
send that data to other systems for processing.
 Systems of systems
 These are systems that are composed of a number of other software systems.

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Software engineering fundamentals

 Some fundamental principles apply to all types of software system,

irrespective of the development techniques used:
 Systems should be developed using a managed and understood development
process. Of course, different processes are used for different types of software.
 Dependability and performance are important for all types of system.
 Understanding and managing the software specification and requirements (what
the software should do) are important.
 Where appropriate, you should reuse software that has already been developed
rather than write new software.

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Internet software engineering

 The Web is now a platform for running applications and organizations are
increasingly developing web-based systems rather than local systems.
 Web services (discussed in Chapter 19) allow application functionality to be
accessed over the web.
 Cloud computing is an approach to the provision of computer services
where applications run remotely on the ‘cloud’.
 Users do not buy the software but pay according to use.

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Web-based software engineering

 Web-based systems are complex distributed systems.

 But the fundamental principles of software engineering discussed
previously are as applicable to them as to any other system type.

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Web software engineering

 Software reuse
 Software reuse is the dominant approach for constructing web-
based systems. When building these systems, you think
about how you can assemble them from pre-existing software
components and systems.
 Incremental and agile development
 Web-based systems should be developed and delivered
incrementally. It is now generally recognized that it is impractical to
specify all the requirements for such systems in advance.

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Web software engineering

 Service-oriented systems
 Software may be implemented using service-oriented software engineering, where the
software components are stand-alone web services.
 For example, we may design a real-world parking application with all components from
the scratch like one for login or signup another containing the map, and many more.
Rather than that I may use google maps for parking availability, pay using payPal or login
using Facebook. These all are independent web service.
 Rich interfaces
 Interface development technologies such as AJAX and HTML5 have emerged that
support the creation of rich interfaces within a web browser.

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 Software engineering ethics

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 Software engineering ethics

 Software engineering involves wider responsibilities than simply the

application of technical skills.
 Software engineers must behave in an honest and ethically responsible
way if they are to be respected as professionals.
 Ethical behaviour is more than simply upholding the law but involves
following a set of principles that are morally correct.

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Issues of professional responsibility

 Confidentiality
 Engineers should normally respect the confidentiality of their employers or clients
irrespective of whether or not a formal confidentiality agreement has been signed.
 Competence
 Engineers should not misrepresent their level of competence. They should not
knowingly accept work that is out of their competence.

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Issues of professional responsibility

 Intellectual property rights

 Engineers should be aware of local laws governing the use of intellectual property
such as patents, copyright, etc. They should be careful to ensure that the intellectual
property of employers and clients is protected.
 Computer misuse
 Software engineers should not use their technical skills to misuse other people’s
computers. Computer misuse ranges from relatively trivial (game playing on an
employer’s machine, say) to extremely serious (dissemination of viruses).

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ACM/IEEE Code of Ethics

 The professional societies in the US have cooperated to produce a code of

ethical practice.
 Members of these organisations sign up to the code of practice when they
join.
 The Code contains eight Principles related to the behaviour of and decisions
made by professional software engineers, including practitioners, educators,
managers, supervisors and policy makers, as well as trainees and students
of the profession.

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Rationale for the code of ethics

 Computers have a central and growing role in commerce, industry, government,

medicine, education, entertainment and society at large. Software engineers are those
who contribute by direct participation or by teaching, to the analysis, specification,
design, development, certification, maintenance and testing of software systems.
 Because of their roles in developing software systems, software engineers have
significant opportunities to do good or cause harm, to enable others to do good or cause
harm, or to influence others to do good or cause harm. To ensure, as much as possible,
that their efforts will be used for good, software engineers must commit themselves to
making software engineering a beneficial and respected profession.

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 The ACM/IEEE Code of Ethics

Software Engineering Code of Ethics and Professional Practice

ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Task Force on Software Engineering Ethics and Professional Practices

PREAMBLE
The short version of the code summarizes aspirations at a high level of the abstraction; the
clauses that are included in the full version give examples and details of how these
aspirations change the way we act as software engineering professionals. Without the
aspirations, the details can become legalistic and tedious; without the details, the
aspirations can become high sounding but empty; together, the aspirations and the details
form a cohesive code.
Software engineers shall commit themselves to making the analysis, specification, design,
development, testing and maintenance of software a beneficial and respected profession. In
accordance with their commitment to the health, safety and welfare of the public, software
engineers shall adhere to the following Eight Principles:

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 Ethical principles

1. PUBLIC - Software engineers shall act consistently with the public interest.
2. CLIENT AND EMPLOYER - Software engineers shall act in a manner that is in the best
interests of their client and employer consistent with the public interest.
3. PRODUCT - Software engineers shall ensure that their products and related
modifications meet the highest professional standards possible.
4. JUDGMENT - Software engineers shall maintain integrity and independence in their
professional judgment.
5. MANAGEMENT - Software engineering managers and leaders shall subscribe to and
promote an ethical approach to the management of software development and
maintenance.
6. PROFESSION - Software engineers shall advance the integrity and reputation of the
profession consistent with the public interest.
7. COLLEAGUES - Software engineers shall be fair to and supportive of their colleagues.
8. SELF - Software engineers shall participate in lifelong learning regarding the practice of
their profession and shall promote an ethical approach to the practice of the profession.

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 Case studies

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Ethical dilemmas

 Disagreement in principle with the policies of senior management.

 Your employer acts in an unethical way and releases a safety-critical system
without finishing the testing of the system.
 Participation in the development of military weapons systems or nuclear
systems. (ethically wrong to develop weapons but strategically correct)

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Case studies

 A personal insulin pump

 An embedded system in an insulin pump used by diabetics to maintain blood glucose
control.
 A mental health case patient management system
 Mentcare. A system used to maintain records of people receiving care for mental health
problems.
 A wilderness weather station
 A data collection system that collects data about weather conditions in remote areas.
 iLearn: a digital learning environment
 A system to support learning in schools

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Insulin pump control system

 Collects data from a blood sugar sensor and calculates the amount of insulin
required to be injected.
 Calculation based on the rate of change of blood sugar levels.
 Sends signals to a micro-pump to deliver the correct dose of insulin.
 Safety-critical system as low blood sugars can lead to brain malfunctioning,
coma and death; high-blood sugar levels have long-term consequences such
as eye and kidney damage.

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Insulin pump hardware architecture

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Activity model of the insulin pump

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Essential high-level requirements

 The system shall be available to deliver insulin when required.

 The system shall perform reliably and deliver the correct amount of insulin to
counteract the current level of blood sugar.
 The system must therefore be designed and implemented to ensure that the
system always meets these requirements.

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Mentcare: A patient information system for mental health care

 A patient information system to support mental health care is a medical

information system that maintains information about patients suffering from
mental health problems and the treatments that they have received.
 Most mental health patients do not require dedicated hospital treatment but
need to attend specialist clinics regularly where they can meet a doctor who
has detailed knowledge of their problems.
 To make it easier for patients to attend, these clinics are not just run in
hospitals. They may also be held in local medical practices or community
centres.

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Mentcare

 Mentcare is an information system that is intended for use in clinics.

 It makes use of a centralized database of patient information but has also
been designed to run on a PC, so that it may be accessed and used from
sites that do not have secure network connectivity.
 When the local systems have secure network access, they use patient
information in the database but they can download and use local copies of
patient records when they are disconnected.

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Mentcare goals

 To generate management information that allows health service managers to

assess performance against local and government targets.
 To provide medical staff with timely information to support the treatment of
patients.

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The organization of the Mentcare system

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Key features of the Mentcare system

 Individual care management

 Clinicians can create records for patients, edit the information
in the system, view patient history, etc. The system supports
data summaries so that doctors can quickly learn about the key
problems and treatments that have been prescribed.
 Patient monitoring
 The system monitors the records of patients that are involved in
treatment and issues warnings if possible problems are detected.
 Administrative reporting
 The system generates monthly management reports showing the
number of patients treated at each clinic, the number of patients
who have entered and left the care system, number of patients
sectioned, the drugs prescribed and their costs, etc.
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Mentcare system concerns

 Privacy
 It is essential that patient information is confidential and is never disclosed to anyone
apart from authorised medical staff and the patient themselves.
 Safety
 Some mental illnesses cause patients to become suicidal or a danger to other
people. Wherever possible, the system should warn medical staff about potentially
suicidal or dangerous patients.
 The system must be available when needed otherwise safety may be compromised and
it may be impossible to prescribe the correct medication to patients (depending upon
history log).

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Wilderness weather station

 The government of a country with large areas of wilderness decides to

deploy several hundred weather stations in remote areas.
 Weather stations collect data from a set of instruments that measure
temperature and pressure, sunshine, rainfall, wind speed and wind direction.
 The weather station includes a number of instruments that measure weather
parameters such as the wind speed and direction, the ground and air temperatures,
the barometric pressure and the rainfall over a 24-hour period. Each of these
instruments is controlled by a software system that takes parameter readings periodically
and manages the data collected from the instruments.


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The weather station’s environment

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Weather information system

 The weather station system

 This is responsible for collecting weather data, carrying out some
initial data processing, and transmitting it to the data
management system.
 The data management and archiving system
 This system collects the data from all of the wilderness weather
stations, carries out data processing and analysis and archives the
data.
 The station maintenance system
 This system can communicate by satellite with all wilderness
weather stations to monitor the health of these systems and
provide reports of problems.

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Additional software functionality

 Monitor the instruments, power and communication hardware and report

faults to the management system.
 Manage the system power, ensuring that batteries are charged whenever the
environmental conditions permit but also that generators are shut down in
potentially damaging weather conditions, such as high wind.
 Support dynamic reconfiguration where parts of the software are replaced
with new versions and where backup instruments are switched into the
system in the event of system failure.

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iLearn: A digital learning environment

 A digital learning environment is a framework in which a set of general-

purpose and specially designed tools for learning may be embedded plus a
set of applications that are geared to the needs of the learners using the
system.
 The tools included in each version of the environment are chosen by
teachers and learners to suit their specific needs.
 These can be general applications such as spreadsheets, learning management
applications such as a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) to manage homework
submission and assessment, games and simulations.

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Service-oriented systems

 The system is a service-oriented system with all system components

considered to be a replaceable service.
 This allows the system to be updated incrementally as new services become
available.
 It also makes it possible to rapidly configure the system to create versions of
the environment for different groups such as very young children who cannot
read, senior students, etc.

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iLearn services

 Utility services that provide basic application-independent functionality and

which may be used by other services in the system.
 Application services that provide specific applications such as email,
conferencing, photo sharing etc. and access to specific educational content
such as scientific films or historical resources.
 Configuration services that are used to adapt the environment with a specific
set of application services and do define how services are shared between
students, teachers and their parents.

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iLearn architecture

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iLearn service integration

 Integrated services are services which offer an API (application programming

interface) and which can be accessed by other services through that API.
Direct service-to-service communication is therefore possible.
 Independent services are services which are simply accessed through a
browser interface and which operate independently of other services.
Information can only be shared with other services through explicit user
actions such as copy and paste; re-authentication may be required for each
independent service.

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Key points

 Software engineering is an engineering discipline that is concerned with all

aspects of software production.
 Essential software product attributes are maintainability, dependability and
security, efficiency and acceptability.
 The high-level activities of specification, development, validation and
evolution are part of all software processes.
 The fundamental notions of software engineering are universally applicable to
all types of system development.

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Key points

 There are many different types of system, and each requires appropriate
software engineering tools and techniques for their development.
 The fundamental ideas of software engineering are applicable to all types of
software system.
 Software engineers have responsibilities to the engineering profession and
society. They should not simply be concerned with technical issues.
 Professional societies publish codes of conduct which set out the standards
of behaviour expected of their members.

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