SYSC 3100 - System Analysis and Design

Basic Concepts Software lifecycles and Requirement Engineering

Questions
How do you build things? How do you think software is built today? Are they the same?

Objectives
1. Describe the software life-cycle 2. Explain the development styles for a small selection of development models. Waterfall V Incremental.

Life cycle
A structured set of activities required to develop a software system Specification; Design; Validation; Evolution. A software life cycle is an abstract representation of a development process. It presents a description of a process from some particular perspective.

Software Life Cycles

A software life cycle has a number of: Distinct activities: requirements, analysis, design, implementation, testing, operation Products: requirements, analysis, design and testing documents, user manual, Rules for completing a phase and transitioning to the next phase

Software Life Cycles

Well-known models for a software life cycle: The Waterfall model The V model Incremental software development

The Rational model (Rational Unified Process)

The waterfall model

Requirements definition System and Software Design Implementation and Unit Testing
Systems services, constraints and goals

System architecture, software system functions

Set of programs or program units

Units and programs are integrated and tested

Integration and System Testing

Operation and Maintenance

Waterfall Model Problems

Inflexible partitioning of the project into distinct stages makes it difficult to respond to changing customer requirements. Therefore, this model is only appropriate when the requirements are well-understood and changes will be fairly limited during the design process. Few business systems have stable requirements. The waterfall model is mostly used for large systems engineering projects where a system is developed at several sites.

The V model
Requirements System Analysis Acceptance Testing System Testing

System Design

Unit and Integration Testing

Implementation

Incremental delivery
Rather than deliver the system as a single delivery, the development and delivery is broken down into increments with each increment delivering part of the required functionality. User requirements are prioritised and the highest priority requirements are included in early increments. Once the development of an increment is started, the requirements are frozen though requirements for later increments can continue to evolve.

Incremental development

Incremental development advantages

Customer value can be delivered with each increment so system functionality is available earlier. Early increments act as a prototype to help elicit requirements for later increments. Lower risk of overall project failure. The highest priority system services tend to receive the most testing.

(Rational) Unified Software Development Process

A modern process model derived from the work on the UML and associated process. Inception is concerned with determining the scope and purpose of the project establishes the business case for the system Elaboration focuses requirements capture and determining the structure/architecture of the system develops an understanding of the problem domain Construction: System design, programming and testing Transition: product installation and rollout

Project Phases
Requirements Inception Analysis

Workflows
Design Implementation Test

1 2
Size of square relative to time spent on workflow

Elaboration

3 4

Construction

5 6 7 8

Transition

9 1 0
Iterations within each phase