Software Development
When humans learned how to operate 1s and 0s, or simply, turning on and off of electrical signals, to calculate data, the surge for faster, easier and more reliable ways for information management never ceased. But like any other discoveries in the past centuries, programming is yet to be perfected. Software development was not a really a lightning-flash development. It involved and continues today to engross various development processes and design models.
Software development is also called software process. To some programmers, software development is actually a software life cycle because certain processes just simply cycle itself. In a nutshell, software development is a basic structure that imposes developmental processes to achieve a software product. Software models on the other hand refer to the different ways and tasks that are involved in the developmental process.
The processes that are involved are very meticulous. But with the help of various software development organizations and the US government, standards now apply to make software development more reliable and more robust. The ISO 2007, for example, has been the worldwide standard for defining the methods of choosing, implementing and guiding the software development life cycle.
ISO 9000 on the other hand provides the standards in software documentations. This results in a formal and neat organization of the software process. The CMM or the Capability Maturity Model is considered to be one of the many important process models. But today a new software process model is being increasingly used to replace CMM. This model is called the CMMI.
Another important framework in software development plan is the SPICE, as described in the ISO 15504. SPICE is short for Software Process Improvement Capability Determination. SPICE is the skeletal support in assessing software processes. This was designed to set out a unique and standardized model to be used for process comparison. In addition, SPICE is built to do 4 tasks: to direct, to control, to guide and to monitor the entire software development cycle.
Another software development methodology is called Six Sigma. Although Six Sigma is still in its infancy stage according to software developers, but the process method is considered to be a useful tool in managing process variations. It uses the statistical analysis and data to determine and further improve the operational performance of a software company. It’s helpful because it pinpoints and eradicates the flaws in the processes. Software developers say Six Sigma is promising but it has to increase its importance to software development. Six Sigma is more on manufacturing, so its contribution to the software industry is still infant.
Normally, there are five simple programming steps that are taught in grade schools. But comprehensive software development involves all of these eight very important steps: domain analysis, software elements analysis, specifications, software architecture, implementation, testing, documentation, software training and maintenance.
Contrary to usual practice, software development does not start with the existence of a technology or a program knowledge. Furthermore, it does not start with coding, but with the presence of a necessity. Analyzing domain means the developers need to figure out if the software to be created is a supplemental software to an existing application, a subordinate software or a completely new software system. Investigation is usually the key process in this step.
After such, identifying the requirements follows as described in the software elements analysis stage. This is an important step leading to the specification of how the codes for the software will be written. At this stage, the blueprint of the software can now be laid out. After rigorous months of coding, the software can then be tested and documented.
Software products once they come out of the shelves are not necessarily perfect. That’s why maintenance is an important phase in the software development process. This keeps the software running not just be identifying, correcting and patching flaws but also by constantly enhancing the usefulness, integrity and robustness of the system. This is how software development works.