Bachelor of Electrical and

Electronics Engineering Year 3 -

Evening (BEEE3E) – Honours

Lesson 2: Software Life Cycle

Introduction to Software Engineering (ISE-311)

Prepared by:
T. Chadza, Lecturer in Telecommunications
School of Engineering – Department of Electrical Engineering
Malawi University of Business and Applied Sciences (MUBAS)
 Last Lesson
• In the last lesson, we developed a good
understanding of the course content and
requirements.

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 Intended learning outcomes
By the end of this lesson, the student should be
able to:
• explain the software life cycle activities types;
• discuss the typical software documents that
can be produced when developing software;
and
• describe the main software life cycle models.

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 References

• Kamwendo, L.Y. 2021. Introduction to Software Engineering Lecturer Notes. MUBAS

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 Outline
• Introduction
• Software life cycle activities types
• Typical software documents
• Software life cycle models
• Summary
• Next lesson

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 Introduction
• Software life cycle
– sequence of different activities that take place
during software development.
• Different deliverables are produced.
– deliverables can be agreements or evaluations,
but normally deliverables are objects (source code
or user manuals)
• Activities and deliverables are closely related.

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• Milestones
– events that can be used for telling the status of
the project.
– Example: the event of completing the user manual
– Essential for project management as they allow
the manager to assess the software development
process

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 Table: Sample milestone
KUWALA HYPOTHERMIA MONITOR
Study Type Milestone End Date
Development Study Order/Buying Materials 1-Jul-18
Paediatric Research Presentation 1-Jul-18
Finishing COMREC 28-May-18
Submitting COMREC 30-May-18
Equipment Lab Testing 1-Jul-18
Nurse Training 9-Jul-18
Data collection 6-Nov-18

Data analysis & Formula Generation 27-Nov-18

Prototyping & Pilot Study Order/Buying Materials 1-Jan-19

Design 1-Jan-19
Final Prototype 1-Mar-19
Tests 1-Mar-19
Trainings 20-Mar-19
Monitoting and Data collection 19-Jul-19
Final Assesment 28-Jul-19
MOH presentation 7-Aug-19
 Software life cycle activities types
Project planning: Cost analysis,
Maintenance Scheduling, Software quality
assurance and Work-breakdown
structure
Implementation

Requirements: Testing: Unit,

Requirement Delivery: Integration, System,
elicitation and Installation, Alpha, Beta,
Domain analysis Training and Help Acceptance and
desk Regression

Design:
Architectural,
What should Feasibility and
Interface and
be the order? Market analysis
detailed

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 3.Project planning: Cost
analysis,
8.Maintenance Scheduling, Software quality
assurance and Work-breakdown
5.Implementation structure

2.Requirements 6. Testing: Unit,

: Requirement 7.Delivery: Integration, System,
elicitation and Installation, Alpha, Beta,
Domain analysis Training and Help Acceptance and
desk Regression

4.Design:
Architectural,
1.Feasibility and
Interface and
Market analysis
detailed

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11
1. Feasibility and Market Analysis
• Feasibility
– Determining if the proposed development is
worthwhile.
• Market analysis
– Determining if there is a potential market for this
product.

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2. Requirements
• Determining what functionality the software
should contain.
• Requirement elicitation:
– Obtaining the user requirements
• Domain analysis:
– Determining what tasks and structures are
common to this problem.

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3. Project planning
• Determining how to develop the software.
• Cost analysis:
– Determining cost estimates.
• Scheduling:
– Building a schedule for the development.
• Software quality assurance:
– Determining activities that will help ensure product quality
• Work-breakdown structure:
– Determining subtasks necessary product development

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4. Design
• Determining how the software should provide the
functionality.
• Architectural :
– Designing the structure of the system.
• Interface :
– Specifying the interfaces between the parts of the
system.
• Detailed:
– Designing the algorithms for the individual parts

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5. Implementation
• Software building
• Coding

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6. Testing
• Executing the software with data to help ensure that
the soft works correctly.
• Unit:
– Testing by the original developer.
• Integration:
– Testing during the integration of the software.
• System:
– Testing the software in an environment that matches the
operational environment.
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6. Testing continued
• Alpha:
– Testing by the customer at the developer’s site.
• Beta:
– Testing by the customer at the customer’s site.
• Acceptance:
– Testing to satisfy the purchaser.
• Regression:
– Saving tests from the previous version to ensure that
the new version retains the previous capabilities

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7. Delivery
• Providing the customer with an effective software
solution.
• Installation:
– Making the software available at the customer’s
operational site.
• Training:
– Teaching the users how to use the software.
• Help desk:
– Answering user questions

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8. Maintenance
• Updating and improving the software to
ensure continued usefulness.

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 Typical Software documents
Statement of work User manual

Software
Software quality
requirements
assurance plan
specification

Project schedule Source code

Software test plan Test report

Software design Defect report

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1. Statement of work
• Preliminary description of desired capabilities,
often produced by the user.
2. Software requirements specification
• Describes what the finished software will do.
• Object model
– Shows main objects/classes
• Use case scenarios
– Show sequences of possible behaviours from the
user’s viewpoint.

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3. Project schedule
• Describes the order of tasks and estimates of
time and effort necessary
4. Software test plan
• Describes how the software will be tested to
ensure proper behaviour.
• Acceptance tests
– designated by the customer to determine
acceptability of the system

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5. Software design
• Describes the structure of the software.
• Architectural
– high-level structure with the interconnections.
• Detailed
– design of low-level modules or objects.

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6. Software quality assurance (SQA) plan
• Describes the activities that will be done to
ensure quality.
7. User manual
• Describes how to use the finished software.
8. Source code
• The actual product code.

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9. Test report
• Describes what tests were done and how the
system behaved.
10. Defect report
• Describes dissatisfaction of the customer with
specific behaviour of the system; usually,
these are software failures or errors.

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 Software life cycle models
• Most common software life cycle models:
– Linear sequential
– Prototyping
– Incremental
– Boehm’s spiral

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Linear sequential
• Also called classic life cycle or waterfall model, as
looks like a series of cascades.
• First described by Royce in 1970
• First realization of a standard sequence of tasks.
• Many Waterfall model versions exist.
• Although specific development tasks occur in
almost every development, there are many ways
to divide them into phases.

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In this version:
• Project planning activities are included in the
requirements phase.
• Delivery and maintenance phases have been
left off.

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• System/information engineering and modeling.
• Because software is always part of a larger system (or
business), work begins by establishing requirements for
all system elements and then allocating some subset of
these requirements to software.
• This system view is essential when software must
interact with other elements
• such as hardware, people, and databases. System
engineering and analysis encompass
• requirements gathering at the system level with a small
amount of top level
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• Problems
– Real projects rarely follow the sequential flow that the
model proposes.
• changes can cause confusion as the project team proceeds.
– Often difficult for the customer to state all
requirements explicitly.
• difficulty accommodating the natural uncertainty that exists
at the beginning of many projects.
– customer must have patience.
• major blunder if undetected until the working program is
reviewed, can be disastrous.

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Prototyping Model
• Builds a throwaway version (or prototype)
intended to test concepts and requirements.
• Prototype demonstrates the proposed behaviour
to customers.
• After customer agreement, software
development usually follows the same phases as
the linear sequential model.
• Effort spent on the prototype usually pays for
itself by not developing unnecessary features.

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• Prototyping paradigm begins with requirements
gathering.
• Developer and customer meet and define the
overall software objectives, identify known
requirements, and outline areas where further
definition is mandatory.
• A "quick design" then occurs

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• Problems
– Customer sees what appears to be a working
version of the software,
• Unaware that the prototype is held together “with
chewing gum and baling wire,” hence overall software
quality or long-term maintainability was not considered
– Developer often makes implementation
compromises in order to get a prototype working
quickly.

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Incremental model
• Proposed by D. L. Parnas
• Goal was to design and deliver to the customer a
minimal subset of the whole system that was still
a useful system.
• Process will continue to iterate through the
whole life cycle with additional minimal
increments.
• Advantages include giving the customer a
working system early and working increments.

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Boehm’s spiral model
• The image of the model is a spiral that starts
in the middle and continually revisits the basic
tasks of customer communication, planning,
risk analysis, engineering, construction and
release, and customer evaluation.

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 Summary
In this lesson, we have:
• explained the software life cycle activities
types;
• discussed the typical software documents that
can be produced when developing software;
and
• described the main software life cycle models.

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 Reading Assignment
• Read on the software life cycle types. Chapter
2.4, 2.5, 2.7.1, 2.7.2

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 Next Lesson
• In the next lesson, we will discuss the
software process and other models

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 Thank you!
Src: IFC 2002

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