Introduction to Software Engineering - 1 | Embedded Systems (Web) - Computer Science Engineering (CSE) PDF Download

Introduction

With the advancement of technology, computers have become more powerful and sophisticated. The more powerful a computer is, the more sophisticated programs it can run. Thus, programmers have been tasked to solve larger and more complex problems. They have coped with this challenge by innovating and by building on their past programming experience. All those past innovations and experience of writing good quality programs in efficient and costeffective ways have been systematically organized into a body of knowledge. This body of knowledge forms the basis of software engineering principles. Thus, we can view software engineering as a systematic collection of past experience. The experience is arranged in the form of methodologies and guidelines.

The Need for Software Engineering

Alternatively, software engineering can be viewed an engineering approach to software development. A small program can be written without using software engineering principles. But if one wants to develop a large software product, then software engineering principles are indispensable to achieve a good quality software cost effectively. These definitions can be elaborated with the help of a building construction analogy.

Suppose you have a friend who asked you to build a small wall as shown in fig. 33.1. You would be able to do that using your common sense. You will get building materials like bricks; cement etc. and you will then build the wall.

Fig. 33.1 A Small Wall

But what would happen if the same friend asked you to build a large multistoried building as shown in fig. 33.2?

Fig. 33.2 A Multistoried Building

You don't have a very good idea about building such a huge complex. It would be very difficult to extend your idea about a small wall construction into constructing a large building. Even if you tried to build a large building, it would collapse because you would not have the requisite knowledge about the strength of materials, testing, planning, architectural design, etc. Building a small wall and building a large building are entirely different ball games. You can use your intuition and still be successful in building a small wall, but building a large building requires knowledge of civil, architectural and other engineering principles.

Without using software engineering principles it would be difficult to develop large programs. In industry it is usually needed to develop large programs to accommodate multiple functions. A problem with developing such large commercial programs is that the complexity and difficulty levels of the programs increase exponentially with their sizes as shown in fig. 33.3. For example, a program of size 1,000 lines of code has some complexity. But a program with 10,000 LOC is not just 10 times more difficult to develop, but may as well turn out to be 100 times more difficult unless software engineering principles are used. In such situations software engineering techniques come to the rescue. Software engineering helps to reduce programming complexity. Software engineering principles use two important techniques to reduce problem complexity: abstraction and decomposition.

The principle of abstraction (in fig. 33.4) implies that a problem can be simplified by omitting irrelevant details. Once the simpler problem is solved then the omitted details can be taken into consideration to solve the next lower level abstraction, and so on.

Fig. 33.3 Increase in development time and effort with problem size

Abstraction and Decomposition

Fig. 33.4 A hierarchy of abstraction

The other approach to tackle problem complexity is decomposition. In this technique, a complex problem is divided into several smaller problems and then the smaller problems are solved one by one. However, in this technique any random decomposition of a problem into smaller parts will not help. The problem has to be decomposed such that each component of the decomposed problem can be solved independently and then the solution of the different components can be combined to get the full solution. A good decomposition of a problem as shown in fig. 33.5 should minimize interactions among various components. If the different subcomponents are interrelated, then the different components cannot be solved separately and the desired reduction in complexity will not be realized.

Fig. 33.5 Decomposition of a large problem into a set of smaller problems

The Software Crisis

Software engineering appears to be among the few options available to tackle the present software crisis.

To explain the present software crisis in simple words, consider the following. The expenses that organizations all around the world are incurring on software purchases compared to those on hardware purchases have been showing a worrying trend over the years (as shown in fig. 33.6)

Fig. 33.6 Change in the relative cost of hardware and software over time

Organizations are spending larger and larger portions of their budget on software. Not only are the software products turning out to be more expensive than hardware, but they also present a host of other problems to the customers: software products are difficult to alter, debug, and enhance; use resources non-optimally; often fail to meet the user requirements; are far from being reliable; frequently crash; and are often delivered late. Among these, the trend of increasing software costs is probably the most important symptom of the present software crisis. Remember that the cost we are talking of here is not on account of increased features, but due to ineffective development of the product characterized by inefficient resource usage, and time and cost over-runs.

There are many factors that have contributed to the making of the present software crisis. Factors are larger problem sizes, lack of adequate training in software engineering, increasing skill shortage, and low productivity improvements.

It is believed that the only satisfactory solution to the present software crisis can possibly come from a spread of software engineering practices among the engineers, coupled with further advancements to the software engineering discipline itself.

Program vs. Software Product

Programs are developed by individuals for their personal use. They are therefore, small in size and have limited functionality but software products are extremely large. In case of a program, the programmer himself is the sole user but on the other hand, in case of a software product, most users are not involved with the development. In case of a program, a single developer is involved but in case of a software product, a large number of developers are involved. For a program, the user interface may not be very important, because the programmer is the sole user. On the other hand, for a software product, user interface must be carefully designed and implemented because developers of that product and users of that product are totally different. In case of a program, very little documentation is expected, but a software product must be well documented. A program can be developed according to the programmer’s individual style of development, but a software product must be developed using the accepted software engineering principles.

Evolution of Program Design Techniques

During the 1950s, most programs were being written in assembly language. These programs were limited to about a few hundreds of lines of assembly code, i.e. were very small in size. Every programmer developed programs in his own individual style - based on his intuition. This type of programming was called Exploratory Programming. The next significant development which occurred during early 1960s in the area computer programming was the high-level language programming. Use of high-level language programming reduced development efforts and development time significantly. Languages like FORTRAN, ALGOL, and COBOL were introduced at that time.

Structured Programming

As the size and complexity of programs kept on increasing, the exploratory programming style proved to be insufficient. Programmers found it increasingly difficult not only to write costeffective and correct programs, but also to understand and maintain programs written by others. To cope with this problem, experienced programmers advised other programmers to pay particular attention to the design of the program’s control flow structure (in late 1960s). In the late 1960s, it was found that the "GOTO" statement was the main culprit which makes control structure of a program complicated and messy.

At that time most of the programmers used assembly languages extensively. They considered use of "GOTO" statements in high-level languages were very natural because of their familiarity with JUMP statements which are very frequently used in assembly language programming. So they did not really accept that they can write programs without using GOTO statements, and considered the frequent use of GOTO statements inevitable. At this time, Dijkstra [1968] published his (now famous) article “GOTO Statements Considered Harmful”. Expectedly, many programmers were enraged to read this article. They published several counter articles highlighting the advantages and inevitable use of GOTO statements. But, soon it was conclusively proved that only three programming constructs – sequence, selection, and iteration – were sufficient to express any programming logic. This formed the basis of the structured programming methodology.

Features of Structured Programming

A structured program uses three types of program constructs i.e. selection, sequence and iteration. Structured programs avoid unstructured control flows by restricting the use of GOTO statements. A structured program consists of a well partitioned set of modules. Structured programming uses single entry, single-exit program constructs such as if-then-else, do-while, etc. Thus, the structured programming principle emphasizes designing neat control structures for programs.

Advantages of Structured Programming

Structured programs are easier to read and understand. Structured programs are easier to maintain. They require less effort and time for development. They are amenable to easier debugging and usually fewer errors are made in the course of writing such programs.

Data Structure-Oriented Design

After structured programming, the next important development was data structure-oriented design. Programmers argued that for writing a good program, it is important to pay more attention to the design of data structure, of the program rather than to the design of its control structure. Data structure-oriented design techniques actually help to derive program structure from the data structure of the program. Example of a very popular data structure-oriented design technique is Jackson's Structured Programming (JSP) methodology, developed by Michael Jackson in the1970s.

Data Flow-Oriented Design

Next significant development in the late 1970s was the development of data flow-oriented design technique. Experienced programmers stated that to have a good program structure, one has to study how the data flows from input to the output of the program. Every program reads data and then processes that data to produce some output. Once the data flow structure is identified, then from there one can derive the program structure.

Object-Oriented Design

Object-oriented design (1980s) is the latest and very widely used technique. It has an intuitively appealing design approach in which natural objects (such as employees, pay-roll register, etc.) occurring in a problem are first identified. Relationships among objects (such as composition, reference and inheritance) are determined. Each object essentially acts as a data hiding entity.

Changes in Software Development Practices

An important difference is that the exploratory software development style is based on error correction while the software engineering principles are primarily based on error prevention. Inherent in the software engineering principles is the realization that it is much more costeffective to prevent errors from occurring than to correct them as and when they are detected. Even when errors occur, software engineering principles emphasize detection of errors as close to the point where the errors are committed as possible. In the exploratory style, errors are detected only during the final product testing. In contrast, the modern practice of software development is to develop the software through several well-defined stages such as requirements specification, design, coding, testing, etc., and attempts are made to detect and fix as many errors as possible in the same phase in which they occur.

In the exploratory style, coding was considered synonymous with software development. For instance, exploratory programming style believed in developing a working system as quickly as possible and then successively modifying it until it performed satisfactorily.

In the modern software development style, coding is regarded as only a small part of the overall software development activities. There are several development activities such as design and testing which typically require much more effort than coding.

A lot of attention is being paid to requirements specification. Significant effort is now being devoted to develop a clear specification of the problem before any development activity is started.

Now, there is a distinct design phase where standard design techniques are employed.

Periodic reviews are being carried out during all stages of the development process. The main objective of carrying out reviews is phase containment of errors, i.e. detect and correct errors as soon as possible. Defects are usually not detected as soon as they occur, rather they are noticed much later in the life cycle. Once a defect is detected, we have to go back to the phase where it was introduced and rework those phases - possibly change the design or change the code and so on.

Today, software testing has become very systematic and standard testing techniques are available. Testing activity has also become all encompassing in the sense that test cases are being developed right from the requirements specification stage.

There is better visibility of design and code. By visibility we mean production of good quality, consistent and standard documents during every phase. In the past, very little attention was paid to producing good quality and consistent documents. In the exploratory style, the design and test activities, even if carried out (in whatever way), were not documented satisfactorily. Today, consciously good quality documents are being developed during product development. This has made fault diagnosis and maintenance smoother.

Now, projects are first thoroughly planned. Project planning normally includes preparation of various types of estimates, resource scheduling, and development of project tracking plans. Several techniques and tools for tasks such as configuration management, cost estimation, scheduling, etc. are used for effective software project management.

Several metrics are being used to help in software project management and software quality assurance.