2 Software development processes
2.1 Stakeholders and activities
Current enterprise systems are large and complex, and their construction involves many stakeholders, including customers, developers and users. Software development processes have emerged over the years to harness the complexity of software construction. A software development process describes an approach to building, deploying and maintaining software (Larman, 2002).
The advantages of following a well-understood process are many. From a manager's viewpoint, it is crucial to have well-defined activities that make it possible to estimate when a final product will be completed and the effort required to achieve it. From developer's viewpoint it is important to have well-defined tasks and clear outcomes, and to know which documents and artefacts should be produced by each of the activities undertaken. From a customer's viewpoint it is fundamental to be reassured that the required product is the one being built and that it will be delivered on time and within budget.
Software development processes vary in the details of the activities they prescribe, the related artefacts, and the software life cycle, i.e. how the activities should be carried out in relation to one another, and how often each activity should be revisited. There are some fundamental development activities that are common to most processes. These are: analysis, design, implementation, and testing.
In very general terms, analysis deals with understanding the problem and what is required of the system to be developed (the requirements); design deals with describing conceptually a software solution that meets the requirements of the problem; implementation builds such a solution; and testing helps to verify and validate it.
Verification is the set of activities that ensures that the software correctly implements a specific function (‘Are we building the product right?’) while validation is the set of activities that ensures that the software developed is traceable to the customer's requirements (‘Are we building the right product’).
Exercise 1
Which of the activities of analysis, design, implementation, and testing involve the participation of customers?
Answer
Solution
Customers will have to be involved mainly during analysis, to discuss the requirement for the system; they should also be involved later in validating and testing the software. However, in a process with short development cycles and frequent iterations, as you will see later, customers have a closer involvement with the whole of the development process.