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Topics covered

 Software process models

 Process activities
Chapter 2 – Software Processes  Coping with change
 Process improvement

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The software process Software process descriptions

 A structured set of activities required to develop a  When we describe and discuss processes, we usually
software system. talk about the activities in these processes such as
specifying a data model, designing a user interface, etc.
 Many different software processes but all involve:
and the ordering of these activities.
 Specification – defining what the system should do;
 Design and implementation – defining the organization of the  Process descriptions may also include:
system and implementing the system;  Products, which are the outcomes of a process activity;
 Validation – checking that it does what the customer wants;  Roles, which reflect the responsibilities of the people involved in
 Evolution – changing the system in response to changing the process;
customer needs.  Pre- and post-conditions, which are statements that are true
 A software process model is an abstract representation before and after a process activity has been enacted or a
product produced.
of a process. It presents a description of a process from
some particular perspective.
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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.
Software process models
 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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The waterfall model

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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Waterfall model phases Waterfall model problems

 There are separate identified phases in the waterfall  Inflexible partitioning of the project into distinct stages
model: makes it difficult to respond to changing customer
 Requirements analysis and definition requirements.
 System and software design  Therefore, this model is only appropriate when the requirements
 Implementation and unit testing are well-understood and changes will be fairly limited during the
design process.
 Integration and system testing
 Few business systems have stable requirements.
 Operation and maintenance
 The waterfall model is mostly used for large systems
 The main drawback of the waterfall model is the difficulty
engineering projects where a system is developed at
of accommodating change after the process is
several sites.
underway. In principle, a phase has to be complete
before moving onto the next phase.  In those circumstances, the plan-driven nature of the waterfall
model helps coordinate the work.

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Incremental development
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 Integration and configuration

 The process is not visible.  Based on software reuse where systems are integrated
 Managers need regular deliverables to measure progress. If from existing components or application systems
systems are developed quickly, it is not cost-effective to produce (sometimes called COTS -Commercial-off-the-shelf)
documents that reflect every version of the system. systems).
 System structure tends to degrade as new increments  Reused elements may be configured to adapt their
are added. behaviour and functionality to a user’s requirements
 Unless time and money is spent on refactoring to improve the
software, regular change tends to corrupt its structure.  Reuse is now the standard approach for building many
Incorporating further software changes becomes increasingly types of business system
difficult and costly.  Reuse covered in more depth in Chapter 15.

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Types of reusable software Reuse-oriented software engineering

 Stand-alone application systems (sometimes called

COTS) that are configured for use in a particular
environment.
 Collections of objects that are developed as a package
to be integrated with a component framework such as
.NET or J2EE.
 Web services that are developed according to service
standards and which are available for remote invocation.

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Key process stages Advantages and disadvantages

 Requirements specification  Reduced costs and risks as less software is developed

 Software discovery and evaluation from scratch
 Faster delivery and deployment of system
 Requirements refinement
 But requirements compromises are inevitable so system
 Application system configuration
may not meet real needs of users
 Component adaptation and integration
 Loss of control over evolution of reused system elements

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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
Process activities 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

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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A general model of the design process

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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Design activities System implementation

 Architectural design, where you identify the overall  The software is implemented either by developing a
structure of the system, the principal components program or programs or by configuring an application
(subsystems or modules), their relationships and how system.
they are distributed.
 Design and implementation are interleaved activities for
 Database design, where you design the system data most types of software system.
structures and how these are to be represented in a
 Programming is an individual activity with no standard
database.
process.
 Interface design, where you define the interfaces  Debugging is the activity of finding program faults and
between system components.
correcting these faults.
 Component selection and design, where you search for
reusable components. If unavailable, you design how it
will operate.
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Stages of testing
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.

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Testing phases in a plan-driven software

Testing stages
process (V-model)

 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.

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Software evolution System 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.

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Coping with change

 Change is inevitable in all large software projects.

 Business changes lead to new and changed system
requirements
Coping with change  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 Coping with changing requirements

 Change anticipation, where the software process  System prototyping, where a version of the system or
includes activities that can anticipate possible changes part of the system is developed quickly to check the
before significant rework is required. customer’s requirements and the feasibility of design
 For example, a prototype system may be developed to show decisions. This approach supports change anticipation.
some key features of the system to customers.
 Incremental delivery, where system increments are
 Change tolerance, where the process is designed so that delivered to the customer for comment and
changes can be accommodated at relatively low cost. experimentation. This supports both change avoidance
 This normally involves some form of incremental development. and change tolerance.
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 Benefits of prototyping

 A prototype is an initial version of a system used to  Improved system usability.

demonstrate concepts and try out design options.  A closer match to users’ real needs.
 A prototype can be used in:
 Improved design quality.
 The requirements engineering process to help with requirements
elicitation and validation;  Improved maintainability.
 In design processes to explore options and develop a UI design;  Reduced development effort.
 In the testing process to run back-to-back tests.

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The process of prototype development

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 Incremental delivery

 Prototypes should be discarded after development as  Rather than deliver the system as a single delivery, the
they are not a good basis for a production system: development and delivery is broken down into
 It may be impossible to tune the system to meet non-functional increments with each increment delivering part of the
requirements; required functionality.
 Prototypes are normally undocumented;
 User requirements are prioritised and the highest priority
 The prototype structure is usually degraded through rapid requirements are included in early increments.
change;
 The prototype probably will not meet normal organisational  Once the development of an increment is started, the
quality standards. requirements are frozen though requirements for later
increments can continue to evolve.

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Incremental development and delivery Incremental 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 Incremental delivery problems

 Customer value can be delivered with each increment so  Most systems require a set of basic facilities that are
system functionality is available earlier. used by different parts of the system.
 Early increments act as a prototype to help elicit  As requirements are not defined in detail until an increment is to
be implemented, it can be hard to identify common facilities that
requirements for later increments.
are needed by all increments.
 Lower risk of overall project failure.  The essence of iterative processes is that the
 The highest priority system services tend to receive the specification is developed in conjunction with the
most testing. 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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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
Process improvement 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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Approaches to improvement The process improvement cycle

 The process maturity approach, which focuses on

improving process and project management and
introducing good software engineering practice.
 The level of process maturity reflects the extent to which good
technical and management practice has been adopted in
organizational software development processes.
 The agile approach, which focuses on iterative
development and the reduction of overheads in the
software process.
 The primary characteristics of agile methods are rapid delivery of
functionality and responsiveness to changing customer
requirements.

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Process improvement activities Process measurement

 Process measurement  Wherever possible, quantitative process data

 You measure one or more attributes of the software process or should be collected
product. These measurements forms a baseline that helps you  However, where organisations do not have clearly defined
decide if process improvements have been effective. process standards this is very difficult as you don’t know what to
 Process analysis measure. A process may have to be defined before any
measurement is possible.
 The current process is assessed, and process weaknesses and
bottlenecks are identified. Process models (sometimes called  Process measurements should be used to
process maps) that describe the process may be developed. assess process improvements
 Process change  But this does not mean that measurements should drive the
improvements. The improvement driver should be the
 Process changes are proposed to address some of the identified
organizational objectives.
process weaknesses. These are introduced and the cycle
resumes to collect data about the effectiveness of the changes.

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Process metrics Capability maturity levels

 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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The SEI capability maturity model Key points

 Initial  Software processes are the activities involved in

 Essentially uncontrolled producing a software system. Software process models
are abstract representations of these processes.
 Repeatable
 Product management procedures defined and used  General process models describe the organization of
software processes.
 Defined
 Examples of these general models include the ‘waterfall’ model,
 Process management procedures and strategies defined incremental development, and reuse-oriented development.
and used
 Requirements engineering is the process of developing a
 Managed
software specification.
 Quality management strategies defined and used
 Optimising
 Process improvement strategies defined and used
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Key points Key points

 Design and implementation processes are concerned  Processes may be structured for iterative development
with transforming a requirements specification into an and delivery so that changes may be made without
executable software system. disrupting the system as a whole.
 Software validation is the process of checking that the  The principal approaches to process improvement are
system conforms to its specification and that it meets the agile approaches, geared to reducing process
real needs of the users of the system. overheads, and maturity-based approaches based on
better process management and the use of good
 Software evolution takes place when you change
software engineering practice.
existing software systems to meet new requirements.
The software must evolve to remain useful.  The SEI process maturity framework identifies maturity
levels that essentially correspond to the use of good
 Processes should include activities such as prototyping
and incremental delivery to cope with change. software engineering practice.

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