Lecture 2 – Software Processes

Part 1

Lecture 2 Software Processes

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Topics covered

 Software process models

 Process activities
 Coping with change
 The Rational Unified Process
 The RUP is a prescriptive, well-defined system development
process, often used to develop systems based on
object and/or component-based technologies
 It is based on sound software engineering principles such as
taking an iterative, requirements-driven, and architecture-centric
approach to software development
 An example of a modern software process.

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The software process

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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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The waterfall model

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Waterfall model phases

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Waterfall model problems

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Incremental development

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Incremental development benefits

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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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Reuse-oriented software engineering

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Reuse-oriented software engineering

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Types of software component

 Web services that are developed according to service

standards and which are available for remote invocation.
 Collections of objects that are developed as a package
to be integrated with a component framework such
as .NET or J2EE.
 Stand-alone software systems (COTS) that are
configured for use in a particular environment.

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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. In the
waterfall model, they are organized in sequence,
whereas in incremental development they are inter-
leaved.

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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
 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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The requirements engineering process

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Software design and implementation

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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
(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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Software validation

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Stages of testing

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Testing stages

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Testing phases in a plan-driven software
process

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Software evolution

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System evolution

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Key points

 Software processes are the activities involved in

producing a software system. Software process models
are abstract representations of these processes.
 General process models describe the organization of
software processes. Examples of these general models
include the ‘waterfall’ model, incremental development,
and reuse-oriented development.

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Key points

 Requirements engineering is the process of developing a

software specification.
 Design and implementation processes are concerned
with transforming a requirements specification into an
executable software system.
 Software validation is the process of checking that the
system conforms to its specification and that it meets the
real needs of the users of the system.
 Software evolution takes place when you change
existing software systems to meet new requirements.
The software must evolve to remain useful.
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Lecture 2 – Software Processes

Part 2

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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 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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Software prototyping

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Benefits of prototyping

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The process of prototype development

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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

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Throw-away prototypes

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Incremental delivery

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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

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Incremental delivery advantages

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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.

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Boehm’s spiral model

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Boehm’s spiral model of the software process

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Spiral model sectors

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Spiral model usage

 Spiral model has been very influential in helping people

think about iteration in software processes and
introducing the risk-driven approach to development.
 In practice, however, the model is rarely used as
published for practical software development.

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The Rational Unified Process

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Phases in the Rational Unified Process

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RUP phases

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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 Lecture 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

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RUP good practice

 Visually model software

 Use graphical UML models to present static and dynamic views
of the software.
 Verify software quality
 Ensure that the software meet’s organizational quality standards.
 Control changes to software
 Manage software changes using a change management system
and configuration management tools.

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Key points

 Processes should include activities to cope with change.

This may involve a prototyping phase that helps avoid
poor decisions on requirements and design.
 Processes may be structured for iterative development
and delivery so that changes may be made without
disrupting the system as a whole.
 The Rational Unified Process is a modern generic
process model that is organized into phases (inception,
elaboration, construction and transition) but separates
activities (requirements, analysis and design, etc.) from
these phases.

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