Conclusion

In this free course, Approaches to software development, you have extended your knowledge of the important ideas in software development. We investigated the characteristics of a good software system, and considered what a development process would need to include to build such software. You saw that there is no single development process to suit the variety of users’ requirements. However there must be a disciplined approach to software development, especially in the case of large projects.

We introduced the notion that it is good practice to split a project into smaller, more manageable activities. When developing good software systems, you should focus on the users’ needs and, wherever possible, make use of replaceable and reusable modules – components. The overall software architecture should be constructed around the users’ requirements.

We then introduced the role of modelling in the development of software. In particular, the concepts of object orientation allow us to represent users’ requirements in a way that reflects our natural tendency to view the world around us in terms of objects. The way we relate the various activities of software development and associated artefacts (including models) was then described.

This OpenLearn course is an adapted extract from the Open University course TM354 Software engineering [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] .