Chapter Two

Software Processes

1
The 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.

2
software process model

• A software process model is an abstract representation of a

process. It presents a description of a process from some
particular perspective.

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Software process descriptions

• When we describe and discuss processes, we usually talk about the

activities in these processes 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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Types of Software processes

• Plan-driven processes
• processes where all of the process activities are planned in advance and progress is
measured against this plan.

• 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.

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Software process models

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Software process models

• Prescriptive Process Models

• The name 'prescriptive' is given because the model prescribes a set of
activities, actions, tasks, quality assurance and change the mechanism for
every project.

• Evolutionary Process Models

• Evolutionary models are iterative. They are characterized in a manner that
enables you to develop increasingly more complete versions of the software.

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Software process models

• Prescriptive Process Models

• Evolutionary Process Models

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Prescriptive Process Models

• The waterfall model

• Incremental development

• RAD model

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The waterfall model

Requirements
definition

System and
software Design
Implementation
and Unit Testing

Integration and
System Testing

Operation and
maintenance
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Waterfall model phases

• 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.
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Waterfall model problems

• 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.

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• a modification to the waterfall model. As software projects

increased in size

• the large projects are subdivided into smaller components.

• each component followed a waterfall process model, passing

through each step iteratively

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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

• 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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RAD model

• RAD is a Rapid Application Development model.

• Software product is developed in a short period of time.

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RAD model

• The RAD model consist of following phases:

• Business Modeling.
• Data modeling.
• Process modeling.
• Application generation.

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RAD model

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Software process models

• Prescriptive Process Models

• Evolutionary Process Models

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Evolutionary Process Models

• Prototyping

• The Spiral Model

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