Question

Explain an example of traditional software processes which would need to keep forms of design documentation and implementation artifacts synchronized and this synchronization is a problem.

Answer 1

Answer:

What is traditional software process?

It is a software development process or software development life cycle which were followed previously for developing or testing software products or projects. This is an old structure imposed on the software products previously. These were the traditional software processes and represents a set of works or phases that is applied to the software design to build and implements a software product and the software that meets a specification were produced.

Example of traditional software process –

The water fall model:

The waterfall model was the first software traditional process model. It is also referred to as a linear-sequential life cycle model. The principal stages of the model represent the fundamental development activities:

Requirements analysis all the possible requirements of the system developed and are captured in this phase and documented in a requirement specification doc.

System and software design. The requirement specifications from first phase are studied in this phase and the system design is prepared. This system design helps in specifying hardware and system requirements and helps in defining the overall system architecture.

Implementation and unit testing. With inputs from the system design, the system is first developed in small programs called units, which are integrated in the next phase. Each unit is developed and tested for its functionality, which is referred to as Unit Testing.

Integration and system testing. In this phase, all the units developed in the implementation phase are integrated into a system after testing of each unit. Post integration the entire system is tested for any faults and failures.

Operation and maintenance. There are some issues which come up in the client environment. To fix those issues, patches are released. Also to enhance the product some better versions are released. Maintenance is done to deliver these changes in the customer environment.

This models need design documents and implementation artifacts synchronized and this synchronization is a problem—

Since waterfall model is a linear model so the next phase cannot start until previous phase has finished and all the stages overlap and feed information to each other and all the documents and artifacts need to be sync. Example during design phase the problem with the problems with the requirements are identified and during the coding phase, design problems are found and so on. This is a problem because cost of the documents preparation and document approvals will increase. It does not allow much revision, when application is testing phase it very difficult to go back and change something that was not documented previously. So we need to keep sync everything in design doc and implementation artifacts synchronized as it will increase cost.