| Software Engineering Process Activities/Steps |
| Thursday, 25 May 2006 | ||||||||||||||||
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Software Engineering processes are composed of many activities, notably the following. They are considered sequential steps in the Waterfall process, but other processes may rearrange or combine them in different ways. Generally, there are 7 steps to follow: Requirements AnalysisExtracting the requirements of a desired software product is the first task in creating it. While customers probably believe they know what the software is to do, it may require skill and experience in software engineering to recognize incomplete, ambiguous or contradictory requirements. Specification Specification is the task of precisely describing the software to be written, in a mathematically 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. Software architecture The architecture of a software system 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. Coding Reducing a design to code may be the most obvious part of the software engineering job, but it is not necessarily the largest portion. Testing Testing of parts of software, especially where code by two different engineers must work together, falls to the software engineer. Documentation An important (and often overlooked) task is documenting the internal design of software for the purpose of future maintenance and enhancement. Documentation is most important for external interfaces. Maintenance Maintaining and enhancing software to cope with newly discovered problems or new requirements can take far more time than the initial development of the software. Not only may it be necessary to add code that does not fit the original design but just determining how software works at some point after it is completed may require significant effort by a software engineer. About 2/3 of all software engineering work is maintenance, but this statistic can be misleading. A small part of that is fixing bugs. Most maintenance is extending systems to do new things, which in many ways can be considered new work. In comparison, about 2/3 of all civil engineering, architecture, and construction work is maintenance in a similar way.
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