Overview of Software Engineering Practices

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  • software engineering process framework activities
    • Communication - developer stakeholder collaboration
    • Planning
    • Modeling - requirements and design
    • Construction - code generation and testing
    • Deployment - customer provides feedback on delivered products
      
      
  • software engineering process umbrella activities
    • Software project tracking and control
    • Risk Management
    • Software quality assurance
    • Formal technical reviews
    • Measurement
    • Software configuration management
    • Reusability management
    • Work product preparation and production
      
      
• software engineering practices consist of the concepts, principles, methods, and tools necessary to accomplish the framework activities
  
  
• essence of practice (Polya, 1945)

  

  • Understand the Problem
    • Who are the stakeholders?
    • What functions and features are required to solve the problem?
    • Is it possible to create smaller problems that are easier to understand?
    • Can a graphic analysis model be created?
  • Plan the Solution
    • Have you seen similar problems before?
    • Has a similar problem been solved?
    • Can readily solvable subproblems be defined?
    • Can a design model be created?
  • Carry Out the Plan
    • Does solution conform to the plan?
    • Is each solution component provably correct?
  • Examine the Result
    • Is it possible to test each component part of the solution?
    • Does the solution produce results that conform to the data, functions, and features required?
      
      
• software engineering practice core principles
  
  
  

Communication

• goals for communication
  • Identify the customer and other stakeholders
  • Establish an effective mode of communication between developers and stakeholders
  • Develop usage scenarios
  • Identify constraints
  • Establish priorities
    
    
• Possible Task Set for Communication
  • Identify primary customer and other stakeholders
  • Meet with customer to define business needs and values, end-user characteristics and needs, required outputs, and business constraints
  • Develop one page written statement of project scope
  • Review statement of scope with stakeholder and revise as needed
  • Collaborate with customer/end-users to define usage scenarios, input, outputs, software features and functions, customer business risks
  • Develop written descriptions of user scenarios, inputs, outputs, features, functions, and risks
  • Iterate with customer to define priorities for user scenarios, features, functions, and risks
  • Assign customer defined priorities to each user scenario, feature, and function
  • Review all information gathered with customers and other stakeholders
  • Prepare for planning activity

Planning

• Goals for Planning
  • Develop an overall project strategy
  • Identify the functionality to be delivered by each software increment
  • Develop a detailed plan for the current iteration
  • Track progress of a regular basis
    
    
• Possible Task Set for Planning
  • Re-evaluate project scope
  • Assess risks
  • Develop/refine user scenarios
  • Extract functions and features from scenarios
  • Define technical functions and features needed for software infrastructure
  • Group functions and features according to customer priorities
  • Create a low granularity project plan
  • Create high granularity plan for current iteration
  • Track progress regularly

Analysis

• we create models to gain a better understanding of the actual entity to be built
  
  
  
  
  
  
  • Possible Task Set for Analysis Modeling
    • Review requirements and constraints
    • Expand and refine user scenarios
    • Model information domain
    • Define analysis classes using information objects as a guide
    • Represent responsibilities and collaborations of each analysis class
    • Group related classes into packages
    • Model functional domain
    • Model behavioral domain
    • Analyze and model the user interface

   

Design

• Possible Task Set for Design
  • Using the analysis model select and architectural style appropriate to the software
  • Partition analysis model into subsystems and allocate subsystems within the architecture
  • Examine the information domain model and design appropriate data structures for data objects and their attributes
  • Create a set of design classes
  • Design User interface
  • Conduct component-level design
  • Develop deployment model

Construction

• Possible Task Set for Construction
  • Build the architectural infrastructure
  • Build a software component
  • Unit test the component
  • Integrate completed component into architectural infrastructure

   

Deployment

• Possible Task Set for Deployment
  • Create delivery media
  • Establish the human support person(s)
  • Establish user feedback mechanisms
  • Disseminate delivery media to all users
  • Conduct on-going support functions
  • Collect user feedback

Notes and figures from:

• Software Engineering: A Practitioner's Approach, 6th Edition, by Roger S Pressman, R.S. Pressman & Associates, McGraw-Hill, 2005