Process Models

Dr. Pilli Emmanuel Shubhakar

Associate Professor
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.

2
Requirements Engineering

3
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

4
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.

5
General Model of Design Process

6
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.

7
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.
• Debugging is the activity of finding program faults and correcting
these faults.

8
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.

9
Stages of Testing

10
Stages of Testing
• 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.
• Customer testing
• Testing with customer data to check that the system meets the customer’s
needs.

11
Testing in a Plan Driven Software Process (V - Model)

12
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.

13
System Evolution

14
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.

15
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.

16
Process Flow CPMCD

• Linear Process Flow:

• In the process flow, each process flow is followed by a single
process.
• The displayed process is as follows: communication, planning,
modeling, construction and deployment.

17
Process Flow
• Iterative Process Flow:
• In the process flow each process is followed by a single process,
however a process can loop back to any process in the flow.
• The displayed process is as follows: communication, planning,
modeling, construction and deployment.
• Planning loops back to communication, modeling loops back to
modeling and construction loops back to communication.

18
Process Flow
• Evolutionary Process Flow
• In the process flow, each process is followed by a single process
• The last process gives a result and loops back to the first process.
• The displayed process is as follows: communication, planning,
modeling, construction and deployment.
• Deployment results in increment released and loops back to
communication.

19
Evolutionary Process Flow

20
Process Flow
• Parallel Process Flow
• In the process flow one or more processes can lead to the next
process.
• The displayed processes are as follows: communication,
planning, modeling, construction and deployment.
• The process is as follows: Communication leads to planning.
Communication and planning lead to modelling.
• Modelling leads to construction which leads to deployment.

21
Parallel Process Flow

22
Prescriptive Process Models
Prescriptive process models advocate an orderly approach to
software engineering.

That leads to a two questions:

• If prescriptive process models strive for structure and order, are they
appropriate for a software world that thrives on change?
• If we reject traditional process models and replace them with something less
structured, do we make it impossible to achieve coordination and coherence
in software work?

23
Waterfall Model
specs

24
Waterfall Model
• 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.

25
Waterfall Model
• 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.

26
Waterfall Model

Pros Cons
• It is easy to understand and plan. • It does not accommodate change well.
• It works for well-understood small projects. • Testing occurs late in the process.
• Analysis and testing are straightforward. • Customer approval is at the end.

27
Incremental Development

28
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.
29
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.

30
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

31
Reducing the Cost
• 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.
• 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.

32
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.

33
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.

34
Process of Protype Development

35
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

36
Throwaway Prototype
• 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.

37
Prototyping Process Model
Pros
• Reduced impact of requirement changes.
• Customer is involved early and often.
• Works well for small projects.
• Reduced likelihood of product rejection.

Cons
• Customer involvement may cause delays.
• Temptation to “ship” a prototype.
• Work lost in a throwaway prototype.
• Hard to plan and manage.

38
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.

39
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.

40
Incremental Development and Delivery

41
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.

42
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.

43
Unified Process Model
Pros
• Quality documentation emphasized.
• Continuous customer involvement.
• Accommodates requirements changes.
• Works well for maintenance projects.

Cons
• Use cases are not always precise.
• Tricky software increment integration.
• Overlapping phases can cause problems.
• Requires expert development team.

44
THANK YOU