Question:THE SOFTWARE PROCESS AND APPLICATION ARCHITECTURES
Assignment Overview
The Unified Process is a conventional "structure" style of progressive design directed by building numerous views of the system architecture. The Unified Process has several characteristics.
It is module-based for easy coordination of object oriented projects
It uses UML notations for object oriented analysis and design for all modeling blueprints
The design process builds use cases to model the behavior of the system
The design is iterative and incremental as the one used in Extreme Programming
As stated in Sommerville's Chapter 3, Figure 3.1, the Unified Process advances through a sequence of cycles as described in the following levels.
The Inception phase confirms the decision to go ahead with the project. The output of this phase provides a finalized business case, a completed feasibility study, and a well-defined project scope.
The Elaboration phase leads to a workable set of specifications for the system. The output of this phase provides the basic architecture, a statement of work (SOW) plan to begin the construction of the system, and a statement confirming to the project team that all project risks have been considered and evaluated.
The Construction phase produces a beta-release system for wide testing. The output of this phase is a "near to complete" system sufficient enough to conduct a variety of testing.
The Transition phase is the implementation stage releasing the new system to a production environment.
As shown in Sommerville's Figure 3. 1, each of the phases undergoes several iterations, each involving the SDLC activities of requirements specification, analysis, design, testing, and final deployment.
The product of the Unified Process is a series of models for each of the key stages in system design. Since many different models are produced for different design purposes, each of the models must be anchored for unity. Some of the models include use cases, design classes and interaction with objects, sequence diagrams, state diagrams, activity diagrams, etc.
Required Reading
For Module 2, read Sommerville' chapter 3 on the software process and review the software process PPT.
Sommerville, I. (2011). The software process. Software Engineering. (9th ed.). Boston, Massachusetts: Adison-Wesley. [Chapter 3: The Software Process]
Sommerville, I. (2011). Software Engineering. 9th ed. Boston, Massachusetts: Adison-Wesley. [Chapter 2: Software Process PPT]
Optional Reading
R.S Pressman and Associates. (2013). Software engineering resources. Retrieved from http://www.rspa.com/spi/
Case Assignment
The Case in Module 2 is twofold. After reading the course materials, please write a 3- to 4-page paper answering the following.
Define the terms software process and Unified Process. In the software engineering context, what is meant by the term model? What is meant by a phase of the Unified Process?
Consider the requirements workflow and the analysis workflow. Would it make more sense to combine these two activities into one workflow than to treat them separately?