Chapter 2 – Software Processes

Chapter 2 Software Processes 1

 Topics covered
• Software process models
• Process iteration
• Process activities
• The Rational Unified Process
• Computer-aided software engineering
• Programming in the large vs. programming in
the small

Chapter 2 Software Processes 2

 Objectives
• To introduce software process models
• To describe software process generic activities
• To describe a number of different process
models and when they may be used
• To differentiate programming in the large and
programming in the small

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 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.
• 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
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
• 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.
• Reuse-oriented software engineering
– The system is assembled from existing 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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The waterfall model

Chapter 2 Software Processes 8

 Waterfall model phases
• 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.

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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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Incremental development

Chapter 2 Software Processes 11

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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 Reuse-oriented software engineering
• Based on systematic reuse where systems are
integrated from existing components or COTS
(Commercial-off-the-shelf) systems.
• Process stages
– Component analysis;
– Requirements modification;
– System design with reuse;
– Development and integration.
• Reuse is now the standard approach for building
many types of business system
– Reuse covered in more depth in Chapter 16.

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Reuse-oriented software engineering

Chapter 2 Software Processes 15

 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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 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.

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 Benefits of prototyping
• Improved system usability.
• A closer match to users’ real needs.
• Improved design quality.
• Improved maintainability.
• Reduced development effort.

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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
• 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.
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 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.
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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
• 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.

Chapter 2 Software Processes 25

 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
• Process is represented as a spiral rather than
as a sequence of activities with backtracking.
• Each loop in the spiral represents a phase in
the process.
• No fixed phases such as specification or design
- loops in the spiral are chosen depending on
what is required.
• Risks are explicitly assessed and resolved
throughout the process.
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Boehm’s spiral model of the software
process

Chapter 2 Software Processes 28

 Spiral model sectors
• Objective setting
– Specific objectives for the phase are identified.
• Risk assessment and reduction
– Risks are assessed and activities put in place to reduce
the key risks.
• Development and validation
– A development model for the system is chosen which
can be any of the generic models.
• Planning
– The project is reviewed and the next phase of the
spiral is planned.

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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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 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

Chapter 2 Software Processes 33

 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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A general model of the design process

Chapter 2 Software Processes 35

 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.

Chapter 2 Software Processes 36

 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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Stages of testing

Chapter 2 Software Processes 38

 Testing stages
• Development or 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.
• Acceptance testing
– Testing with customer data to check that the system
meets the customer’s needs.

Chapter 2 Software Processes 39

Testing phases in a plan-driven
software process

Chapter 2 Software Processes 40

 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.

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System evolution

Chapter 2 Software Processes 42

 The Rational Unified Process
• A modern generic process derived from the work
on the UML and associated process.
• Brings together aspects of the 3 generic process
models discussed previously.
• Normally described from 3 perspectives
– A dynamic perspective that shows phases over time;
– A static perspective that shows process activities;
– A practive perspective that suggests good practice.

Chapter 2 Software Processes 43

Phases in the Rational Unified Process

Chapter 2 Software Processes 44

 RUP phases
• Inception
– Establish the business case for the system.
• Elaboration
– Develop an understanding of the problem domain
and the system architecture.
• Construction
– System design, programming and testing.
• Transition
– Deploy the system in its operating environment.

Chapter 2 Software Processes 45

 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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RUP phases

Chapter 2 Software Processes 47

 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.

Chapter 2 Software Processes 48

 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 Chapter 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.

Chapter 2 Software Processes 49

RUP work products

Chapter 2 Software Processes 50

 RUP good practice
• Develop software iteratively
– Plan increments based on customer priorities and
deliver highest priority increments first.
• Manage requirements
– Explicitly document customer requirements and
keep track of changes to these requirements.
• Use component-based architectures
– Organize the system architecture as a set of
reusable components.

Chapter 2 Software Processes 51

 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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 Programming in the small vs.
Programming in the large

• Programming in the small is a single-person activity

concerned with the development of single-version
software which is both specified and meant to be used
by the person who develops it.

• Programming in the large is a multi-person activity

concerned with the development of multi-version
software which is both specified and meant to be used
by people other than the team who develops it.

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 Differences between programming in the
large and programming in the small
• programming in the small is a personal endeavour,
while programming in the large is a collective one;

• programming in the small requires no communication

between developers, while programming in the large
does;

• software resulting from programming in the small is a

one-off stable product, while software resulting from
programming in the large is expected to undergo many
changes.
Chapter 2 Software Processes 54
 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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 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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