Chapter 2 –

Software
Processes

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Topics covered
• Software process models
• Process activities
• Coping with change
• Process improvement

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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 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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 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.
• But there are bad practices!
• Debugging is the activity of finding program faults and correcting these
faults.

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Stages of testing to show
Verification and validation

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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.

Acceptance/Customer testing
• Testing with customer data to check that the system meets the customer’s
needs.

Test often!!

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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.

Hardware evolution?

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 Coping with change

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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 anticipation, 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.
• Customers may not know what they want

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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Coping with changing
requirements
System prototyping - where a version of the system or part of the
system is developed quickly to check the customer’s requirements and
the feasibility of design decisions. This approach supports change
anticipation.
Incremental delivery - where system increments are delivered to the
customer for comment and experimentation. This supports both change
avoidance and change tolerance.

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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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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
• It needs to look like it works

Do not build on prototypes,

Throw Them Away!

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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 advantages
Customer value can be delivered with each increment so system
functionality is available earlier.
Early increments 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 problem
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.

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 Process improvement

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Process improvement
Many software companies have turned to software process
improvement as a way of enhancing the quality of their software,
reducing costs or accelerating their development processes.
Process improvement means understanding existing processes and
changing these processes to increase product quality and/or reduce
costs and development time.

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The process improvement cycle

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Process improvement activities
Process measurement
• You measure one or more attributes of the software process or product.
These measurements forms a baseline that helps you decide if process
improvements have been effective.

Process analysis
• The current process is assessed, and process weaknesses and bottlenecks
are identified. Process models (sometimes called process maps) that
describe the process may be developed.

Process change
• Process changes are proposed to address some of the identified process
weaknesses. These are introduced and the cycle resumes to collect data
about the effectiveness of the changes.

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Process measurement
Wherever possible, quantitative process data
should be collected
• However, where organisations do not have clearly defined process
standards this is very difficult as you don’t know what to measure.
A process may have to be defined before any measurement is
possible.

Process measurements should be used to

assess process improvements
• But this does not mean that measurements should drive the
improvements. The improvement driver should be the
organizational objectives.

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Process metrics
Time taken for process activities to be
completed
• E.g. Calendar time or effort to complete an activity or process.

Resources required for processes or activities

• E.g. Total effort in person-days.

Number of occurrences of a particular event

• E.g. Number of defects discovered.

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