Experiment No : 01

What is Software?
Computer software, or just software, is a collection of computer programs and related data that provides the instructions for telling a computer what to do and how to do it. Software refers to one or more computer programs and data held in the storage of the computer. In other words, software is a set of programs, procedures, algorithms and its documentation concerned with the operation of a data processing system. Program software performs the function of the program it implements, either by directly providing instructions to the digital electronics or by serving as input to another piece of software. The term was coined to contrast to the old term hardware (meaning physical devices). In contrast to hardware, software "cannot be touched". Software is also sometimes used in a more narrow sense, meaning application software only. Sometimes the term includes data that has not traditionally been associated with computers, such as film, tapes, and records.

What is Software Engineering?

Software engineering (SE) is the application of a systematic, disciplined, quantifiable approach to the design, development, operation, and maintenance of software, and the study of these approaches; that is, the application of engineering to software. In layman's terms, it is the act of using insights to conceive, model and scale a solution to a problem. The term software engineering first appeared in the 1968 NATO Software Engineering Conference and was meant to provoke thought regarding the perceived "software crisis" at the time. Software development, a much used and more generic term, does not necessarily subsume the engineering paradigm. The generally accepted concepts of Software Engineering as an engineering discipline have been specified in the Guide to the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK). The SWEBOK has become an internationally accepted standard ISO/IEC TR 19759:2005.

What is Software Model (Water Model)? Models

A software process model is an abstraction of software process. These are also called process paradigms. Various general process models are waterfall model, evolutionary development model and component-based software engineering model. These are widely used in current software engineering practice. For large systems, these are used together.

Waterfall model
Definition : The waterfall model is a sequential design process, often used in software development processes, in which progress is seen as flowing steadily downwards (like a waterfall) through the phases of Conception, Initiation, Analysis, Design, Construction, Testing, Production/Implementation, and Maintenance. The waterfall model was one of the first published model for the software process. This model divides software processes in various phases. These phases are:

Requirements analysis Software design Unit testing System testing Maintenance

The activities should be performed individually but in practice, they often overlap. During the maintenance stage, the software is put into use. During this, additional problems might be discovered and the need of new feature may arise. This may require the software to undergo the previous phases once again.

Different Phases of

Water Fall Model:

Requirements analysis in systems engineering and software engineering, encompasses those

tasks that go into determining the needs or conditions to meet for a new or altered product, taking account of the possibly conflicting requirements of the various stakeholders, such as beneficiaries or users. It is an early stage in the more general activity of requirements engineering which encompasses all activities concerned with eliciting, analyzing, documenting, validating and managing software or system requirements.

Software design is a process of problem solving and planning for a software solution. After the
purpose and specifications of software are determined, software developers will design or employ designers to develop a plan for a solution. It includes low-level component and algorithm implementation issues as well as the architectural view.

Unit testing is a method by which individual units of source code, sets of one or more computer
program modules together with associated control data, usage procedures, and operating procedures, are tested to determine if they are fit for use. Intuitively, one can view a unit as the smallest testable part of an application. In procedural programming a unit could be an entire module but is more commonly an individual function or procedure. In object-oriented programming a unit is often an entire interface, such as a class, but could be an individual method. Unit tests are created by programmers or occasionally by white box testers during the development process.

System testing of software or hardware is testing conducted on a complete, integrated system to

evaluate the system's compliance with its specified requirements. System testing falls within the scope of black box testing, and as such, should require no knowledge of the inner design of the code or logic. r As a rule, system testing takes, as its input, all of the "integrated" software components that have successfully passed integration testing and also the software system itself integrated with any applicable hardware system(s). The purpose of integration testing is to detect any inconsistencies between the software units that are integrated together (called assemblages) or between any of the assemblages and the hardware. System testing is a more limited type of testing; it seeks to detect defects both within the "inter-assemblages" and also within the system as a whole.