Software Process Models

The slides and the material of this chapter is adopted from:

1. “Software Engineering”, by I. Somerville, 7th Ed., 2004.
2. “Software Engineering: A Practitioner’s Approach,” by R.S. Pressman, 6th Ed., 2005.
 Objective
 To introduce software process models
 To describe the generic process models and when
they may be used

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 Topics covered
 Software process models
 The waterfall model
 Incremental model
 Evolutionary development
 Specialized process models

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 The software process
 A structured set of activities required to develop a
software system
 Specification;
 Design;
 implementation
 Validation;
 Evolution.
 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 models
 The waterfall model
 Incremental model
 Evolutionary development
 Specialized process models
 Agile processes

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 Waterfall model

Requir ements
definition

System and
software design

Implementa tion
and unit testing

Integ ration and

system testing

Oper ation and

maintenance

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 Incremental development

Define outline Assign requirements Design system

requirements to increments architectur e

Develop system Valida te Integ rate Validate

increment increment increment system
Final
system
System incomplete

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 Evolutionary development
 Prototyping
 Exploratory development
 Throw-away prototyping
 Spiral model

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 Prototyping

Quick
Qu ic k p la n
plan
Co m m u n ic at io n
communication

Modeling
Mo d e lin g
Qu icdesign
Quick k d e s ig n

De ploym e nt
Deployment
De live ry &
delivery
& Fe e d b ac k Co n s t ru c t io n
feedback Construction
of
of prototype
p ro t o t yp e

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 Still Other Process Models
 Component based development—the process to
apply when reuse is a development objective
 Formal methods—emphasizes the mathematical
specification of requirements
 Unified Process—a “use-case driven,
architecture-centric, iterative and incremental”
software process closely aligned with the Unified
Modeling Language (UML)

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 Summary
 Software processes are the activities involved in
producing and evolving a software system.
 Software process models are abstract
representations of these processes.
 General activities are specification, design and
implementation, validation and evolution.
 Generic process models describe the organisation
of software processes.
 Specialized software processes do exist

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