Question

Software engineering consists of four fundamental processes. The common processes are also known as the Software Development Lifecycle.

1. In ten sentences, list each of the four fundamental processes and how they interrelated in the Software Development Lifecycle). A software process is the set of activities that will be applied to design and build a software solution.  
2. UML, Use Cases, Activity Diagrams and Sequence Diagrams are integral for the fundamental processes. Provide a seven sentence explanation of how these models integrate with the fundamental processes.
3. Provide an eight-sentence overview of at least two activities that may be part of the fundamental process.

Answer 1

The four fundamental processes and their interrelation in Software Development:

1. The first fundamental process of Software engineering is Specification which defines what the software does.

2. The second fundamental process of Software engineering is Design and Implementation which helps in defining the software and data organization and implementing the system.

3. Designing involves design software architecture and identify the major system components.

4. Implementation involves adding detail to the design and programming of the system.

5. Design and implementation are closely related and are normally inter-leaved activities.

6. The third fundamental process of Software engineering is Validation which helps in testing the system for bugs and checking the system whether it meets the requirement or not.

7. Verification and Validation are intended to show that a system meets its stated requirements and also meet the real needs of the system customer.

8. The fourth fundamental process of Software engineering is Evolution which helps in changing the system after it has gone into use.

9. They are organized differently in different development models.

10. In the Waterfall model, they are organized in a sequence whereas in incremental development model they are interleaved.

Seven sentence explanation of how these models integrate with the fundamental processes are:

1. Planning phase involves resource allocation, Capacity Planning, Project Scheduling, Cost Estimation of the project and product management.

2. The requirement phase gathers the requirements for new development and enhancement from business stakeholders.

3. After understanding the requirement, the developers and software architects can begin designing the software.

4. The software which is designed is then developed by the software development team.

5. After the production of the software in the development phase, it is been tested by the testing team.

6. Once the software is tested, it is deployed in the deployment phase.

7. In the operation and maintenance phase, the team continuously monitor the software to ensure proper operation and maintain the software regularly by fixing by the bugs and issues.

Overview of Design and Testing that may be part of the fundamental process is:

1. The design process uses the patterns for application architecture and software development which are already established.

2. The Architects may use TOGAF architecture framework to compose an application from existing components.

3. The design pattern is used by developers to solve algorithmic problems in a consistent way.

4. The design phase also includes some prototyping for comparing the solutions in order to find the best alternative.

5. The testing phase is very important in order to know how to software is performing and what changes do we need to make.

6. Without testing the developed software, a company won't be able to deliver the best quality software to its customers.

7. In order to measure quality, Code quality, Unit testing, Integrated testing, performance testing, security testing are used

8. The output of the Testing phase is to make the software ready for deployment by checking whether the software is working perfectly or not.