Software Engineering 1

by

Charlie D. Baguio

and

Jose Rizal Memorial State University

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof

may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever
without the express written permission of the author
except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

ISBN 000-0000-00-0

First Edition. English. __________

JOSE RIZAL MEMORIAL STATE UNIVERSITY

Gov. Guading Adaza St. Sta Cruz, Dapitan City, 7101
Tel. No. (065) 908-8294
[email protected]
UNIT 1 – Introduction to Software Engineering

This course is a continuation of the first course on Software Engineering. In

order to set the context of our discussion, let us first look at some of the
definitions of software engineering.

Software Engineering is the set of processes and tools to develop software.

Software Engineering is the combination of all the tools, techniques, and
processes that used in software production. Therefore Software Engineering
encompasses all those things that are used in software production like:
 Programming Language
 Programming Language Design
 Software Design Techniques
 Tools
 Testing
 Maintenance
 Development etc.

So all those thing that are related to software are also related to software
engineering. Some of you might have thought that how programming language
design could be related to software engineering. If you look more closely at the
software engineering definitions described above then you will definitely see that
software engineering is related to all those things that are helpful in software
development. So is the case with programming language design. Programming
language design is one of the major successes in last fifty years. The design of
Ada language was considered as the considerable effort in software engineering.
These days object-oriented programming is widely being used. If programming
languages will not support object-orientation then it will be very difficult to
implement object oriented design using object-oriented principles. All these
efforts made the basis of software engineering.

Well-Engineered Software
Let’s talk something about what is well-engineered software. Well-
engineered software is one that has the following characteristics.
 It is reliable
 It has good user-interface
 It has acceptable performance
 It is of good quality
 It is cost-effective

Every company can build software with unlimited resources but well-engineered
software is one that conforms to all characteristics listed above.

Software has very close relationship with economics. When ever we talk about
engineering systems we always first analyze whether this is economically
feasible or not. Therefore you have to engineer all the activities of software
development while keeping its economical feasibility intact.

The major challenges for a software engineer is that he has to build software
within limited time and budget in a cost-effective way and with good quality

Therefore well-engineered software has the following characteristics.

Provides the required functionality
 Maintainable
 Reliable
 Efficient
 User-friendly
 Cost-effective

But most of the times software engineers ends up in conflict among all these
goals. It is also a big challenge for a software engineer to resolve all these
conflicts.

The Balancing Act!

Software Engineering is actually the balancing act. You have to balance

many things like cost, user friendliness, Efficiency, Reliability etc. You have to
analyze which one is the more important feature for your software is it reliability,
efficiency, user friendliness or something else. There is always a trade-off among
all these requirements of software. It may be the case that if you try to make it
more user-friendly then the efficiency may suffer. And if you try to make it more
cost-effective then reliability may suffer. Therefore there is always a trade-off
between these characteristics of software.

These requirements may be conflicting. For example, there may be tension

among the following:
 Cost vs. Efficiency
 Cost vs. Reliability
 Efficiency vs. User-interface

A Software Engineer is required to analyze these conflicting entities and tries to

strike a balance.

Challenge is to balance these requirements.

Software Engineers always confront with the challenge to make a good balance
of all these things depending on the requirements of the particular software
system at hand. He should analyze how much weight should all these things get
such that it will have acceptable quality, acceptable performance and will have
acceptable user-interface. In some software the efficiency is more important and
desirable. For example if we talk about a cruise missile or a nuclear reactor
controller that are droved by the software systems then performance and
reliability is far more important than the cost-effectiveness and user-friendliness.
In these cases if your software does not react within a certain amount of time
then it may result in the disaster like Chernobyl accident. Therefore software
development is a process of balancing among different characteristics of
software described in the previous section. And it is an art to come up with such
a good balance and that art can be learned from experience.

Law of diminishing returns

In order to understand this concept lets take a look at an example. Most of you
have noticed that if you dissolve sugar in a glass of water then the sweetness of
water will increase gradually. But at a certain level of saturation no more sugar
will dissolved into water. Therefore at that point of saturation the sweetness of
water will not increase even if you add more sugar into it. The law of diminishing
act describes the same phenomenon. Similar is the case with software
engineering. Whenever you perform any task like improving the efficiency of the
system, try to improve its quality or user friendliness then all these things
involves an element of cost. If the quality of your system is not acceptable then
with the investment of little money it could be improved to a higher degree. But
after reaching at a certain level of quality the return on investment on the system’
s quality will become reduced. Meaning that the return on investment on quality
of software will be less than the effort or money we invest. Therefore, in most of
the cases, after reaching at a reasonable level of quality we do not try to improve
the quality of software any further. This phenomenon is shown in the figure
below.

Software Background

Caper Jones a renounced practitioner and researcher in the filed of Software

Engineering, had made immense research in software team productivity,
software quality, software cost factors and other fields relate to software
engineering. He made a company named Software Productivity Research in
which they analyzed many projects and published the results in the form of
books. Let’s look at the summary of these results. He divided software related
activities into about twenty-five different categories listed in the table below. They
have analyzed around 10000 software projects to come up with such a
categorization. But here to cut down the discussion we will only describe nine of
them that are listed below.
 Project Management
 Requirement Engineering
 Design
 Coding
 Testing
 Software Quality Assurance
 Software Configuration Management
 Software Integration and
 Rest of the activities
One thing to note here is that you cannot say that anyone of these activities is
dominant among others in terms of effort putted into it. Here the point that we
want to emphasize is that, though coding is very important but it is not more than
13-14% of the whole effort of software development.

Software Development

The construction activities are those that are directly related to the construction
or development of the software. While the management activities are those that
complement the process of construction in order to perform construction activities
smoothly and effectively. A greater detail of the activities involved in the
construction and management categories is presented below.

Construction
The construction activities are those that directly related to the development of
software, e.g. gathering the requirements of the software, develop design,
implement and test the software etc. Some of the major construction activities
are listed below.
 Requirement Gathering
 Design Development
 Coding
 Testing

Management
Management activities are kind of umbrella activities that are used to smoothly
and successfully perform the construction activities e.g. project planning,
software quality assurance etc. Some of the major management activities are
listed below.
 Project Planning and Management
 Configuration Management
 Software Quality Assurance
 Installation and Training
Figure 1. Development Activities

As we have said earlier that management activities are kind of umbrella activities
that surround the construction activities so that the construction process may
proceed smoothly. This fact is empathized in the Figure1. The figure shows that
construction is surrounded by management activities. That is, certain processes
and rules govern all construction activities. These processes and rules are
related to the management of the construction activities and not the construction
itself.

A Software Engineering Framework

The software development organization must have special focus on quality while
performing the software engineering activities. Based on this commitment to
quality by the organization, a software engineering framework is proposed that is
shown in Figure 2. The major components of this framework are described
below.

Quality Focus: As we have said earlier, the given framework is based on the
organizational commitment to quality. The quality focus demands that processes
be defined for rational and timely development of software. And quality should be
emphasized while executing these processes.

Processes: The processes are set of key process areas (KPAs) for effectively
manage and deliver quality software in a cost effective manner. The processes
define the tasks to be performed and the order in which they are to be performed.
Every task has some deliverables and every deliverable should be delivered at a
particular milestone.
Methods: Methods provide the technical “how-to’s” to carryout these tasks.
There could be more than one technique to perform a task and different
techniques could be used in different situations.

Tools: Tools provide automated or semi-automated support for software

processes, methods, and quality control.

Figure 2. Software Engineering Framework

Software Development Loop

Let’s now look at software engineering activities from a different perspective.

Software development activities could be performed in a cyclic and that cycle is
called software development loop which is shown in Figure3. The major stages of
software development loop are described below.

Problem Definition: In this stage we determine what is the problem against

which we are going to develop software. Here we try to completely comprehend
the issues and requirements of the software system to build.

Technical Development: In this stage we try to find the solution of the problem
on technical grounds and base our actual implementation on it. This is the stage
where a new system is actually developed that solves the problem defined in the
first stage.
Solution Integration: If there are already developed system(s) available with
which our new system has to interact then those systems should also be the part
of our new system. All those existing system(s) integrate with our new system at
this stage.
Status Quo: After going through the previous three stages successfully, when
we actually deployed the new system at the user site then that situation is called
status quo. But once we get new requirements then we need to change the
status quo.

After getting new requirements we perform all the steps in the software
development loop again. The software developed through this process has the
property that this could be evolved and integrated easily with the existing
systems.

Figure 3. Software Development Loop