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What is Software Engineering?(6)
There are a number of proposed definitions of software engineering:
“The establishment and use of sound engineering principles (methods) in order to obtain economically, software that is reliable and works on real machines.” (1)
A more comprehensive definition proposed by the IEEE [IEEE 93]:
Software engineering; (1) “The application of a systematic, disciplined, quantifiable approach to the development, operation and maintenance of software; that is, the application of engineering to software. ... Computer science is concerned with the theories and method that underlie computers and software systems. ...
Software engineering involves the application of the various theories and methods derived from computer science to make high quality software systems or to make improvements to existing software systems. In the same way that some knowledge of physics is essential to electrical engineers, some knowledge of computer science is essential for software engineers. All of software engineering should ideally be under pinned by theories of computer science, but in reality, this is not the case. Software engineers must often make use of ad hoc approaches to software development.
The set of activities and associated results, which produce a software product, is known as the software process and it is software engineers who mainly conduct such activities. It is essentially the set of activities needed to transform a user’s requirements into a software system. ... The Software development process
There are four fundamental process activities common to all software processes: (6)
· Software specification: This encompasses all activities concerned with defining the functionality of the software and the constraints on its operations.
· Software development: Activities associated with producing the software to meet the desired specification.
· Software validation: Activities associated with testing and validating the software to ensure that it does exactly what the customer wants.
· Software Evolution: The software must evolve to meet changing customer needs.
These activities are organised in different ways in different software processes. ... If an inappropriate process is used there will be a reduction in the quality or the usefulness of the software product to be developed.
Software process models are used to present a simplified description of a software process from a particular perspective. It is an abstraction of the actual process being described and may include activities, which are part of the software process, software products and the roles of the people involved in the software engineering. Some examples of the types of software process model, which may be produced, include:
· Workflow models: Showing the sequence of activities in the process together with their inputs, outputs and dependencies. ...
· Role/ action models: This shows the various roles of the people involved in the software processes and the activities for which they are responsible.
There are a number of different general models or paradigms of software development including; the Waterfall Model, Evolutionary Development Model, Formal Transformation Model & System Assembly from Reusable Components.
Although we will look at the Waterfall Model of software development in more detail this paper is primarily concerned with those software development processes based upon the principles of object-oriented analysis and design, which too, will be defined during the course of this paper. In particular, this paper deals with the Unified Software Development Process (UP) and UML and comparisons will be made between these object-oriented approaches and the more structured approaches such as the Waterfall Model.
The Waterfall Model (6,10)
The Waterfall Model was the first published model of the software development process and it was derived from other engineering processes. ...
· System and software design: This stage partitions the requirements into either hardware or software systems.
Approximate Word count = 2933
Approximate Pages = 11.7
(250 words per page double spaced)
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