Assignment on Programming and Testing

The systems development life cycle (SDLC), or software development life cycle in systems engineering, information systems and software engineering, is a process of creating or altering information systems, and the models and methodologies that people use to develop these systems. In software engineering the SDLC concept underpins many kinds of software development methodologies. These methodologies form the framework for planning and controlling the creation of an information system [1]: the software development process.

Systems development phases

The System Development Life Cycle framework provides a sequence of activities for system designers and developers to follow. It consists of a set of steps or phases in which each phase of the SDLC uses the results of the previous one. A Systems Development Life Cycle (SDLC) adheres to important phases that are essential for developers, such as planning, analysis, design, and implementation, and are explained in the section below. A number of system development life cycle (SDLC) models have been created: waterfall, fountain, spiral, build and fix, rapid prototyping, incremental, and synchronize and stabilize. The oldest of these, and the best known, is the waterfall model: a sequence of stages in which the output of each stage becomes the input for the next. These stages can be characterized and divided up in different ways, including the following

Project planning, feasibility study: Establishes a high-level view of the intended project and determines its goals. Systems analysis, requirements definition: Defines project goals into defined functions and operation of the intended application. Analyzes end-user information needs. Systems design: Describes desired features and operations in detail, including screen layouts, business rules, process diagrams, pseudo code and other documentation. Implementation: The real code is written here.

Integration and testing: Brings all the pieces together into a special testing environment, then checks for errors, bugs and interoperability. Acceptance, installation, deployment: The final stage of initial development, where the software is put into production and runs actual business. Maintenance: What happens during the rest of the software's life: changes, correction, additions, moves to a different computing platform and more. This, the least glamorous and perhaps most important step of all, goes on seemingly forever.

In the following example (see picture) these stage of the systems development life cycle are divided in ten steps from definition to creation and modification of IT work products:

The tenth phase occurs when the system is disposed of and the task performed is either eliminated or transferred to other systems. The tasks and work products for each phase are described in subsequent chapters. Not every project will require that the phases be sequentially executed. However, the phases are interdependent. Depending upon the size and complexity of the project, phases may be combined or may overlap.

System analysis
The goal of system analysis is to determine where the problem is in an attempt to fix the system. This step involves breaking down the system in different pieces to analyze the situation, analyzing project goals, breaking down what needs to be created and attempting to engage users so that definite requirements can be defined. Requirements analysis sometimes requires individuals/teams from client as well as service provider sides to get detailed and accurate requirements; often there has to be a lot of communication to and from to understand these requirements. Requirement gathering is the most crucial aspect as many times communication gaps arise in this phase and this leads to validation errors and bugs in the software program.

Design
In systems design the design functions and operations are described in detail, including screen layouts, business rules, process diagrams and other documentation. The output of this stage will describe the new system as a collection of modules or subsystems. The design stage takes as its initial input the requirements identified in the approved requirements document. For each requirement, a set of one or more design elements will be produced as a result of interviews, workshops, and/or prototype efforts. Design elements describe the desired software features in detail, and generally include functional hierarchy diagrams, screen layout diagrams, tables of business rules, business process diagrams, pseudocode, and a complete entity-relationship diagram with a full data dictionary. These design elements are intended to describe the software in sufficient detail that skilled programmers may develop the software with minimal additional input design.

Testing
The code is tested at various levels in software testing. Unit, system and user acceptance testings are often performed. This is a grey area as many different opinions exist as to what the stages of testing are and how much if any iteration occurs. Iteration is not generally part of the waterfall model, but usually some occur at this stage. In the testing the whole system is test one by one Following are the types of testing:

Defect testing the failed scenarios, including defect tracking Path testing Data set testing Unit testing System testing Integration testing Black-box testing White-box testing Regression testing Automation testing User acceptance testing Performance testing

Operations and maintenance

The deployment of the system includes changes and enhancements before the decommissioning or sunset of the system. Maintaining the system is an important aspect of SDLC. As key personnel change positions in the organization, new changes will be implemented, which will require system Example:-

Waterfall model
The waterfall model is a sequential design process, often used in software development processes, in which progress is seen as flowing steadily downwards (like a waterfall) through the phases of Conception, Initiation, Analysis, Design, Construction, Testing, Production/Implementation and Maintenance.

The waterfall development model originates in the manufacturing and construction industries: highly structured physical environments in which after-the-fact changes are prohibitively costly, if not impossible. Since no formal software development methodologies existed at the time, this hardware-oriented model was simply adapted for software development.

Spiral model
he spiral model is a software development process combining elements of both design and prototyping-instages, in an effort to combine advantages of top-down and bottom-up concepts. Also known as the spiral lifecycle model (or spiral development), it is a systems development method (SDM) used in information technology (IT). This model of development combines the features of the prototyping and the waterfall model. The spiral model is intended for large, expensive and complicated projects. This should not be confused with the Helical model of modern systems architecture that uses a dynamic programming approach in order to optimise the system's architecture before design decisions are made by coders that would cause problems.

Pseudo code
Pseudo code is a compact and informal high-level description of the operating principle of a computer program or other algorithm. It uses the structural conventions of a programming language, but is intended for human reading rather than machine reading. Pseudo code typically omits details that are not essential for human understanding of the algorithm, such as variable declarations, system-specific code and some subroutines. The programming language is augmented with natural language descriptions details, where convenient, or with compact mathematical notation. The purpose of using pseudo code is that it is easier for persons to understand than conventional programming language code, and that it is an efficient and environment-independent description of the key principles of an algorithm. It is commonly used in textbooks and scientific publications that are documenting various algorithms, and also in planning of computer program development, for sketching out the structure of the program before the actual coding takes place. Pseudo-code is a non-formal language, a way to create a logical structure, describing the actions, which will be executed by the application. Using pseudo-code, the developer describes the application logic using his native language, without applying the structural rules of a specific programming language. The big plus of the pseudocode is that the application logic can be easily understood by any developer in the development team (in this case, it doesnt depend, which programming language knows each team member). Also, when the application algorithm is described in pseudo-code, it is very easy to transform the pseudo-code into real code (using any programming language). Pseudo-code is a non-formal language, a way to create a logical structure, describing the actions, which will be executed by the application. Using pseudo-code, the developer describes the application logic using his native language, without applying the structural rules of a specific programming language. The big plus of the pseudo-code is that the application logic can be easily understood by any developer in the development team (in this case, it doesnt depend, which programming language knows each team member). Also, when the application algorithm is described in pseudo-code, it is very easy to transform the pseudo-code into real code (using any programming language).

Programming paradigm
A programming paradigm is a fundamental style of computer programming. (Compare with a methodology, which is a style of solving specific software engineering problems.) Paradigms differ in the concepts and abstractions used to represent the elements of a program (such as objects, functions, variables, constraints, etc.) and the steps that compose a computation (assignment, evaluation, continuations, data flows, etc.). A programming model is an abstraction of a computer system. For example, the "von Neumann model" is a model used in traditional sequential computers. For parallel computing, there are many possible models typically reflecting different ways processors can be interconnected. The most common are based on shared memory, distributed memory with message passing, or a hybrid of the two. A programming language can support multiple paradigms. For example, programs written in C++ or Object Pascal can be purely procedural, or purely object-oriented, or contain elements of both paradigms. Software designers and programmers decide how to use those paradigm elements. In object-oriented programming, programmers can think of a program as a collection of interacting objects, while in functional programming a program can be thought of as a sequence of stateless function evaluations. When programming computers or systems with many processors, process-oriented programming allows programmers to think about applications as sets of concurrent processes acting upon logically shared data structures.

Just as different groups in software engineering advocate different methodologies, different programming languages advocate different programming paradigms. Some languages are designed to support one particular paradigm (Smalltalk supports object-oriented programming, Haskell supports functional programming), while other programming languages support multiple paradigms (such as Object Pascal, C++, Java, C#, Visual Basic, Common Lisp, Scheme, Perl, Python, Ruby, Oz and F Sharp).