Software development process

Contents

1 Overview

2 Software development activities

2.1 Requirements analysis

2.2 Specification

2.3 Architecture

2.4 Implementation, testing and documenting

2.5 Deployment and maintenance

3 Models

3.1 Iterative processes

3.2 Agile software development

3.3 XP: Extreme Programming

3.4 Waterfall processes

3.5 Other models

4 Formal methods

A software development process is a structure imposed on the development of a software product. Synonyms include software life cycle and software process. There are several models for such processes, each describing approaches to a variety of tasks or activities that take place during the process.

Overview

A largely growing body of software development organizations implement process methodologies. Many of them are in the defense industry, which in the U.S. requires a rating based on 'process models' to obtain contracts.

The international standard for describing the method of selecting, implementing and monitoring the life cycle for software is ISO 12207.

A decades-long goal has been to find repeatable, predictable processes that improve productivity and quality. Some try to systematize or formalize the seemingly unruly task of writing software. Others apply project management techniques to writing software. Without project management, software projects can easily be delivered late or over budget. With large numbers of software projects not meeting their expectations in terms of functionality, cost, or delivery schedule, effective project management appears to be lacking.

Organizations may create a Software Engineering Process Group (SEPG), which is the focal point for process improvement. Composed of line practitioners who have varied skills, the group is at the center of the collaborative effort of everyone in the organization who is involved with software engineering process improvement.

Software development activities

Requirements analysis

The important task in creating a software product is extracting the requirements or requirements analysis. Customers typically have an abstract idea of what they want as an end result, but not what software should do. Incomplete, ambiguous, or even contradictory requirements are recognized by skilled and experienced software engineers at this point. Frequently demonstrating live code may help reduce the risk that the requirements are incorrect.

Once the general requirements are gleaned from the client, an analysis of the scope of the development should be determined and clearly stated. This is often called a scope document. Certain functionality may be out of scope of the project as a function of cost or as a result of unclear requirements at the start of development. If the development is done externally, this document can be considered a legal document so that if there are ever disputes, any ambiguity of what was promised to the client can be clarified.

Domain Analysis is often the first step in attempting to design a new piece of software, whether it be an addition to an existing software, a new application, a new subsystem or a whole new system. Assuming that the developers (including the analysts) are not sufficiently knowledgeable in the subject area of the new software, the first task is to investigate the so-called "domain" of the software. The more knowledgeable they are about the domain already, the less work required. Another objective of this work is to make the analysts, who will later try to elicit and gather the requirements from the area experts, speak with them in the domain's own terminology, facilitating a better understanding of what is being said by these experts. If the analyst does not use the proper terminology it is likely that they will not be taken seriously, thus this phase is an important prelude to extracting and gathering the requirements. If an analyst hasn't done the appropriate work confusion may ensue: "I know you believe you understood what you think I said, but I am not sure you realize what you heard is not what I meant."[1]

Specification

Specification is the task of precisely describing the software to be written, possibly in a rigorous way. In practice, most successful specifications are written to understand and fine-tune applications that were already well-developed, although safety-critical software systems are often carefully specified prior to application development. Specifications are most important for external interfaces that must remain stable. A good way to determine whether the specifications are sufficiently precise is to have a third party review the documents making sure that the requirements and Use Cases are logically sound.

Architecture

The architecture of a software system or software architecture refers to an abstract representation of that system. Architecture is concerned with making sure the software system will meet the requirements of the product, as well as ensuring that future requirements can be addressed. The architecture step also addresses interfaces between the software system and other software products, as well as the underlying hardware or the host operating system.

Implementation, testing and documenting

Implementation is the part of the process where software engineers actually program the code for the project.

Software testing is an integral and important part of the software development process. This part of the process ensures that bugs are recognized as early as possible.

Documenting the internal design of software for the purpose of future maintenance and enhancement is done throughout development. This may also include the authoring of an API, be it external or internal.

Deployment and maintenance

Deployment starts after the code is appropriately tested, is approved for release and sold or otherwise distributed into a production environment.

Software Training and Support is important because a large percentage of software projects fail because the developers fail to realize that it doesn't matter how much time and planning a development team puts into creating software if nobody in an organization ends up using it. People are often resistant to change and avoid venturing into an unfamiliar area, so as a part of the deployment phase, it is very important to have training classes for new clients of your software.

Maintenance and enhancing software to cope with newly discovered problems or new requirements can take far more time than the initial development of the software. It may be necessary to add code that does not fit the original design to correct an unforeseen problem or it may be that a customer is requesting more functionality and code can be added to accommodate their requests. It is during this phase that customer calls come in and you see whether your testing was extensive enough to uncover the problems before customers do.

Bug Tracking System tools are often deployed at this stage of the process to allow development teams to interface with customer/field teams testing the software to identify any real or perceived issues. These software tools, both open source and commercially licensed, provide a customizable process to acquire, review, acknowledge, and respond to reported issues.

Models

Iterative processes

Iterative development[2] prescribes the construction of initially small but ever larger portions of a software project to help all those involved to uncover important issues early before problems or faulty assumptions can lead to disaster. Iterative processes are preferred by commercial developers because it allows a potential of reaching the design goals of a customer who does not know how to define what they want.

Agile software development

Agile software development processes are built on the foundation of iterative development. To that foundation they add a lighter, more people-centric viewpoint than traditional approaches. Agile processes use feedback, rather than planning, as their primary control mechanism. The feedback is driven by regular tests and releases of the evolving software.

Interestingly, surveys have shown the potential for significant efficiency gains over the waterfall method. For example, a survey, published in August 2006 by VersionOne and Agile Alliance and based on polling more than 700 companies claims the following benefits for an Agile approach.[3] The survey was repeated in August 2007 with about 1,700 respondents.[4]

XP: Extreme Programming

Extreme Programming (XP) is the best-known iterative process. In XP, the phases are carried out in extremely small (or "continuous") steps compared to the older, "batch" processes. The (intentionally incomplete) first pass through the steps might take a day or a week, rather than the months or years of each complete step in the Waterfall model. First, one writes automated tests, to provide concrete goals for development. Next is coding (by a pair of programmers), which is complete when all the tests pass, and the programmers can't think of any more tests that are needed. Design and architecture emerge out of refactoring, and come after coding. Design is done by the same people who do the coding. (Only the last feature - merging design and code - is common to all the other agile processes.) The incomplete but functional system is deployed or demonstrated for (some subset of) the users (at least one of which is on the development team). At this point, the practitioners start again on writing tests for the next most important part of the system.

Waterfall processes

The waterfall model shows a process, where developers are to follow these steps in order:

1- Requirements specification (AKA Verification or Analysis)

2- Design

3- Construction (AKA implementation or coding)

4- Integration

5- Testing and debugging (AKA validation)

6- Installation (AKA deployment)

7- Maintenance

After each step is finished, the process proceeds to the next step, just as builders don't revise the foundation of a house after the framing has been erected.

There is a misconception that the process has no provision for correcting errors in early steps (for example, in the requirements). In fact this is where the domain of requirements management comes in, which includes change control. The counter argument, by critics to the process, is the significantly increased cost in correcting problems through introduction of iterations. This is also the factor that extends delivery time and makes this process increasingly unpopular even in high risk projects.

This approach is used in high risk projects, particularly large defense contracts. The problems in waterfall do not arise from "immature engineering practices, particularly in requirements analysis and requirements management." Studies of the failure rate of the DOD-STD-2167 specification, which enforced waterfall, have shown that the more closely a project follows its process, specifically in up-front requirements gathering, the more likely the project is to release features that are not used in their current form[citation needed].

Often the supposed stages are part of review between customer and supplier, the supplier can, in fact, develop at risk and evolve the design but must sell off the design at a key milestone called Critical Design Review (CDR). This shifts engineering burdens from engineers to customers who may have other skills

Other models

Capability Maturity Model Integration

The Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) is one of the leading models and based on best practice. Independent assessments grade organizations on how well they follow their defined processes, not on the quality of those processes or the software produced. CMMI has replaced CMM.

ISO 9000

ISO 9000 describes standards for formally organizing processes with documentation.

ISO 15504

ISO 15504, also known as Software Process Improvement Capability Determination (SPICE), is a "framework for the assessment of software processes". This standard is aimed at setting out a clear model for process comparison. SPICE is used much like CMMI. It models processes to manage, control, guide and monitor software development. This model is then used to measure what a development organization or project team actually does during software development. This information is analyzed to identify weaknesses and drive improvement. It also identifies strengths that can be continued or integrated into common practice for that organization or team.

Six sigma

Six Sigma is a methodology to manage process variations that uses data and statistical analysis to measure and improve a company's operational performance. It works by identifying and eliminating defects in manufacturing and service-related processes. The maximum permissible defects is 3.4 per one million opportunities. However, Six Sigma is manufacturing-oriented and needs further research on its relevance to software development.

Test Driven Development

Test Driven Development (TDD) is a useful output of the Agile camp but some suggest that it raises a conundrum. TDD requires that a unit test be written for a class before the class is written. It might be thought, then, that the class firstly has to be "discovered" and secondly defined in sufficient detail to allow the write-test-once-and-code-until-class-passes model that TDD actually uses. This would be actually counter to Agile approaches, particularly (so-called) Agile Modeling, where developers are still encouraged to code early, with light design. However, to get the claimed benefits of TDD a full design down to class and responsibilities (captured using, for example, Design By Contract) is not necessary. This would count towards iterative development, with a design locked down, but not iterative design - as heavy refactoring and re-engineering might negate the usefulness of TDD.

Formal methods

Formal methods are mathematical approaches to solving software (and hardware) problems at the requirements, specification and design levels. Examples of formal methods include the B-Method, Petri nets, Automated theorem proving, RAISE and VDM. Various formal specification notations are available, such as the Z notation. More generally, automata theory can be used to build up and validate application behavior by designing a system of finite state machines.

Finite state machine (FSM) based methodologies allow executable software specification and by-passing of conventional coding (see virtual finite state machine or event driven finite state machine).

Formal methods are most likely to be applied in avionics software, particularly where the software is safety critical. Software safety assurance standards, such as DO178B demand formal methods at the highest level of categorization (Level A).

Formalization of software development is creeping in, in other places, with the application of Object Constraint Language (and specializations such as Java Modeling Language) and especially with Model-driven architecture allowing execution of designs, if not specifications.

Another emerging trend in software development is to write a specification in some form of logic (usually a variation of FOL), and then to directly execute the logic as though it were a program. The OWL language, based on Description Logic, is an example. There is also work on mapping some version of English (or another natural language) automatically to and from logic, and executing the logic directly. Examples are Attempto Controlled English, and Internet Business Logic, which does not seek to control the vocabulary or syntax. A feature of systems that support bidirectional English-logic mapping and direct execution of the logic is that they can be made to explain their results, in English, at the business or scientific level.

The Government Accountability Office, in a 2003 report on one of the Federal Aviation Administration’s air traffic control modernization programs[5], recommends following the agency’s guidance for managing major acquisition systems by

- establishing, maintaining, and controlling an accurate, valid, and current performance measurement baseline, which would include negotiating all authorized, unpriced work within 3 months;

- conducting an integrated baseline review of any major contract modifications within 6 months; and

- preparing a rigorous life-cycle cost estimate, including a risk assessment, in accordance with the Acquisition System Toolset’s guidance and identifying the level of uncertainty inherent in the estimate.

The activities of the software development process represented in the waterfall model. There are several other models to represent this process.