SPE 110642
What Software Do We Expect? An Engineering View vs. IT View
Sharon Wang, SPE, George Woo, SPE, and Zhongming Chen, SPE, BJ Services Company
Copyright 2007, Society of Petroleum Engineers
This paper was prepared for presentation at the 2007 SPE Annual Technical Conference and
Exhibition held in Anaheim, California, U.S.A., 11–14 November 2007.
This paper was selected for presentation by an SPE Program Committee following review of
information contained in an abstract submitted by the author(s). Contents of the paper, as
presented, have not been reviewed by the Society of Petroleum Engineers and are subject to
correction by the author(s). The material, as presented, does not necessarily reflect any
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SPE meetings are subject to publication review by Editorial Committees of the Society of
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Abstract
In today’s modern computing era, computer applications have
become indispensable for engineers to do their work. Some
software works well, meeting technical requirements and
expectations, while others are not very effective because of
their instability, unfriendly user interface, or difficulty to use.
Since computing is a typical skill of engineers and the
engineers also know the solutions for the particular problems,
it is common for them to write programs for their own needs.
However, as a project and application grow bigger and more
sophisticated, the problems related to application software
design and architecture, which impact software extensibility
without degrading the software performance, become
apparent. When a program is written without concern for
overall design, the maintenance of the software becomes more
costly and difficult. Alternatively, a program developed by an
individual who lacks the necessary technical background, may
not be intuitive to use or may not address all technical needs
of the engineer. A good program not only must meet the
business requirements and specifications necessary to provide
engineering solutions, but also must be user-friendly, and
intuitive for users to learn and use easily. Thus, the users can
focus on their specific job instead of struggling with a
confusing manual, or trying to avoid causing a software crash.
Understanding the business domain and prospective user’s
practice helps developers create more useful tools.
This paper discusses the cause of the problems in software
quality from the perspective of both the user and IT
professional on complexity and facilitation, extensibility and
adaptability of software. The paper also proposes some
suggestions for IT professionals to develop quality, favorable
application software for users. It also provides guidelines for
engineer users and project managers to evaluate and purchase
software.
Introduction:
The computer is an essential tool for an engineer handling
complex engineering computations. Computer software carries
out computing ideas/methodologies or business rules, and also
instructs the computer to finish a specific job. The quality of
the software along with the process of building a software as a
whole needs to be reviewed to discover what has been missed
on the software perspectives between IT’s professionals and
the engineers/engineering software users in oil/gas industry.
Due to the computer’s important role in most engineering
fields, engineers often use this valuable tool to do repetitive,
tedious numerical computations. When FORTRAN was first
introduced in the 1950’s, it became a popular computing
language for engineers to use in solving their sophisticated
mathematics problems by expressing their thoughts directly in
commonly understood mathematical notation1. As the
computing power of personal computer increased, more and
more engineers wrote programs to solve their particular
engineering problems. Some of those applications even
became legacy codes because of the beautiful thoughts and
elegant mathematical solutions. The increased use of
computers in a wider range of engineering fields demands
more new functions and features to be added, thus
transforming the original program from a simple tool to
business application software or a part of the business process.
The incremental functions and modifications make a software
application larger and more complex; these changes also raise
concerns about extensibility and maintainability of the
software. The more modifications made to the software, the
more difficult and expensive the software’s maintenance
becomes. Software extensibility, which measures the
capability of new functions and features to be added, and
modularity, which is defined in software structural design, are
beyond simple programming, translating the thoughts or ideas
into computer language.
On other side, the rapidly growing demand for the
development of engineering application software brought
more IT professionals into the oil/gas industry, helping the
industry shift to a new stage by changing the way petroleum
engineers do business. In fact, Information Technology and
digital computing have been transforming the way we do
business in every domain. During the software development
process, the first step is the business requirement analysis. At
this stage the software developers try to list all the business
2 SPE 110642
requirements and specifications, but this is not easy. Often all
the specifications and requirements of the software application
can not be defined and given completely to the software
developers at the beginning of the project. However, the
software project success depends on an effective analysis and
management of requirements. Most serious problems
associated with software development are related to
incomplete or inadequate requirement analysis and
management. Based on the Standish Group Study in 19942,
user involvement and clear statements of requirement are the
primary factors for a successful project. No matter which
software process model is selected to develop the application
software, (Waterfall Model, Spiral Model or Iterative Model),
requirement errors are likely to be the most expensive errors to
fix later. Software developers must be sure to understand the
problems and users’ needs before beginning to envision or
define the solutions. However, communication gaps or
misunderstanding exist between software users and developers
when the developers lack the background and knowledge in
that particular area. It is also very hard for users to precisely
express their needs in a way that developers can understand.
For a large application software development, it is common
that each group generally lacks expertise in the domain of
others. The users and developers have different perspectives
on the problem and may make different assumptions regarding
the nature of the solution. In such a case, misunderstandings
about project objectives, or communication gaps between the
two groups may result in software failing to meet the
customer’s needs, or the software not being a favorable tool to
users because of difficulty of learning and using it.
What software do we expect? What software attributes should
we consider? These questions really refer to the software
quality issue. Software quality is controlled by software design
and the process of building the software from software
engineering perspective. To software users, the software
usability, a measure of how easy the software is to use, is what
they really care about, and this is based on how well a
developer understands the business process and the potential
user’s practice.
This paper addresses some of challenges of software
development and along with some of questions asked by the
engineers, project managers, application users and developers.
It proposes some solutions for those challenges.
Challenges
Defining and measuring software quality is subject to different
views of the software users and the software developers.
From software developer’s standpoint, software quality is
measured by its reliability, performance, usability,
interoperability, portability and verifiability3.
- Reliability: measuring how gracefully the software
can recover from crash.
- Performance: measuring some required behavior
relevant to some relative time constraint.
- Usability: measuring how easy people can utilize the
software
- Interoperability: the ability of the software to co-exist
and co-operate with other systems and components.
- Portability: measuring how easily the software runs
in different environments - different hardware,
operating system or other software in which the
system is expected to interact.
- Verifiability: Measuring how easy the software can
be verified.
From the software user’s perspective, quality software should
be reliable, stable, recoverable, extensible and easy to learn
and use.
When a program’s role changes from a tool performing one
simple function to a complicated application that carries out a
series of functions, the process of building the program is no
longer a simple programming process. It becomes a software
engineering process in which the software product is
developed. The process can no longer be done by a single
programmer; instead, it requires a team. Those who are
involved in the team know how difficult it is to maintain
large/complex code if the software is not well-designed and
properly documented.
Why is software development not easy?
The common perceptions of software are:
• Software is soft; it is intangible and malleable.
• Software construction is a human-intensive activity.
• Software problems are unprecedentedly complex.
• Software solutions require unusual rigor.
• Software has a discontinuous operational nature.
• Scaling up a system causes a nonlinear increase in
complexity.
Enterprise software is a part of the business process, and
building such software is a form of product development.
Software products are subject to frequent change either to
support new requirements and specifications or to repair
defects. Therefore, the software system must be designed in
such way that facilitates changes without degrading other
desirable properties of software. This is a great challenge that
the software designers and developers face. Software
designers are required certain domain knowledge of the
related problem/project and solutions to make a good design
decision. The software designer and developer must also
consider the user’s practice, instead of changing the user’s
natural way of doing a job, so that the user is receptive to the
software.
The following questions are asked frequently by project
managers, software users, engineers, and software developers,
based on their perspectives and backgrounds:
ƒ What factors affect software quality? How do we
define good software?
ƒ Is it more efficient to keep legacy code and modify it,
or just build another one from scratch?
SPE 110642
ƒ How do we make a software application easy to adapt
to new or changing business functions?
ƒ Why does some software appear simple and intuitive
to use, while other software confuses the users?
ƒ What should we know about software engineering? Is
the software engineering the same as the
programming?
ƒ How do we evaluate and choose a software
application?
ƒ How can we anticipate and meet customers’ needs?
The questions listed above indicate different thoughts and
concerns about software from both the IT side and the user’s
side. By clarifying the misunderstanding and confusion
between programming and software engineering, and by
closing the gaps of understanding and perspectives about
software from both the developers and users, we can improve
the software product’s quality and the software project’s
management.
Software design and architecture influence software’s
performance, interoperability and extensibility, but this
concept is beyond the petroleum engineering discipline, and
may not be seriously considered by a programmer whose
specialty domain area is not IT specialty. It is necessary for
non-IT people who are writing a program to understand what
the software architecture is. Additionally, the keys to good
software are not found only in process quality, but rather in a
closer link between process and product quality and in the
active commitment to that goal. The human activities of the
development process determine what software will emerge.
Application Software Design and Architecture
Every large software system is made up of pieces that are
linked together, and interact with each other. The architecture
facilitates those links. Like other system architecture, software
architecture is a high-level design representation, which
focuses on the composition of software components and how
those components interact. Generally the building components
are user interface, functions and modules, and database
connection components. The relation between those
components is illustrated in following diagram.
Functions and Modules
DataBase
The attributes describing the architecture are 4-6
• Complexity and flexibility,
• Adaptability and extensibility,
3
• Performance and scalability,
• Security and volatility,
• Compliance and standard,
• Testability and maintainability.
Flexibility, adaptability and extensibility refer to the capability
of changes in the software. It tells whether software can be
modified from existing legacy code to add new functions.
In a well-structured software system, one module/component
interacts with another module/component through a stable
interface and does not need to be concerned with other
module’s implementation, this makes software adapt to new or
changing functions easily because a change in one module
does not require a change in other modules.
Good software design minimizes the time required to create,
modify and maintain the software while achieving acceptable
run-time performance7.
The objective of the software architecture is to keep
irreversible decisions to a minimum, and provides a
framework that supports interactive development8. It can be
achieved through Object Oriented methodology/technique,
which includes Object-Oriented-Analysis, Object-Oriented-
Design and Object-Oriented-Programming.
As it becomes apparent that tolerance to changes is vital to a
software system, the software architecture must be able to
support incremental changes. That is why the service-oriented
architecture and components based architecture are rapidly
replacing monolithic architecture.
The flowing process of the software architecture is illustrated
in Fig. 1.
After examining the structure of a software application, one
can determine whether the current software application can be
modified from legacy code, or a new program must be built. If
the components in the original program were designed in low-
coupling structure, in which every component in the system
does not couple very tightly, it is possible to reuse the
components and turn the legacy code to new use by modifying
it. Otherwise try to understand functions of the procedures,
dependence between the components and modules, and
variables and constants, and build a new program with open
structure, such as object-oriented or services-oriented
framework. Analyzing the legacy code could be a time-
consuming task. By using an automated code analyzer9, lots of
information can be extracted from legacy code, and the
information can help determine the possibility of reuse
possibilities.
Software Engineering vs. Programming
Similar to other engineering practices, large software systems
must be developed by a team in a group activity, which is the
software engineering process. What should we know about
software engineering?
4 SPE 110642
Software engineering is a profession, an engineering
discipline, an application of engineering, scientific and
mathematical principles and methods.
Software engineering is the field of computer science that
deals with the building large and complex software systems.
Programming is primarily a personal activity; it is a single
aspect of software development.
A programmer spends the majority of his or her time
generating code.
A software engineer, on the other hand, writes a software
component that will be combined with components written by
other software engineers to build a system.
Now we know the software development process involves not
only generating code to instruct the computer, but also
including the software architecture design that determines the
connection and interaction between components in the
software system. The process of building the software is
heavily impacted by the activity of people involved – Software
engineers/developers and programmers.
To build a quality and favorable software, software developers
need to pre-view the software from a user’s perceptive to
improve the software usability. Following are suggestions for
software developers.
Suggestions for Better Software Development
Because the poorly defined requirements and specifications
are the most common cause of poor quality software, the
following concerns must be considered at the beginning of
software development:
1. Gathering and verifying the description of software
behavior
Software is built to meet the needs of someone other than the
developers. Software behavior must be planned carefully
before the software is built. The process is finished by
requirement engineering. Software requirements engineering
is the art and science of developing an accurate and complete
definition of the software behavior that can serves as the basis
for development10. Following are several aspects to be
considered:
- Characterize most professionals’ views of the process by
interviewing users, observing user’s work and discussing
with users
- Understand the business rules and domain knowledge
required of the process. A walking-through example in a
tutorial is very helpful to a user, and it requires a good
understanding of the domain knowledge and the business
process. Understanding the domain knowledge in that
particular field and the business process help the
developers anticipate the users’ future needs in the
software.
2. Adhering to users’ working practice in user-interface
design, not intending to change the traditional way of the
prospective user’s doing a task
The software is designed to facilitate the engineers doing their
job well, rather than prevent them from doing it. Consistent
methodology with current work practice of users makes
learning to use the software easier, more familiar and
comfortable. For an engineer user, an intuitive tool should be
designed in such way that conforms to the way an engineer
used to work, rather than totally changes to different working
procedure especially for a traditional engineering process.
A comprehensible, easy-to-use interactive product is the result
of thorough group assessments in which the context and
purpose of use are carefully considered. To make computers
more usable and receptive to the users, the software designer
must carefully analyze the interaction between human and
computer during user interface design.
For given constraints, optimizing interface design makes
software easy to learn and intuitive to use. Human-computer
interaction is an interdisciplinary area combining several
aspects from different field including11:
- Computer Science – concerning how to design algorithms
- Psychology and related fields – concerning the
capabilities of human memory and perception
- Artificial Intelligence and related field - concerning how
to automate work, or make computers behave like
intelligent assistants
- Computer Graphics Design – concerning how to output
information visually
Software Evaluation:
Those planning to purchase a software application need do
some homework before purchasing to avoid or reduce the risk
of wasting money. The following is a check list for evaluating
the software.
Guidelines for Evaluating Software
- Develop a clear statement of the business requirements
and specifications; ensure that the software meets all
important business requirements and specifications;
- Define and prioritize the software product quality
requirements, such as reliability, performance,
adaptability and so forth.
- Review the software specifications to see if they satisfy
the quality requirements.
- Examine the features and functions of the software;
determine which functions and specifications are essential
and which are unnecessary, compare the essential
functions among different vendors.
- Make sure that the software structure design is easy to
extend components/modules if needed in the future.
- Ensure the software has an easy-to-follow users’ guide or
online tutorial for learning. An interface design that is
similar to existing software is familiar to users, and it will
reduce the time of learning the software.
- Obtain a trial version of the software since most software
vendors provide the services to prospective customers;
SPE 110642 5

make sure adequate tests are done for a wider-range of References

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Fig. 1 Software System Architecture Definition 12

6. Evaluate Architecture with Others

1. Consolidate Inputs

Acceptable
2. Identify Scenarios

Not acceptable
3. Identify Relevant Architectural System

4. Produce Candidate Architecture 7A. Rework Architecture 7B. Review Requirements

5. Explore Architectural Option