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In last month's issue of The Rational Edge, I began a four-part series of articles that summarize our experience and discuss the key approaches that have enabled our customers to make substantial improvements in software development economics.http://www.cognence.com/pdfs/ImprovingSoftwareDevelopmentEconomicsPartII.pdf. The most significant way to improve economic results is usually to achieve a software solution with the minimum amount of human-generated source material. Managing Scope The scope of a software product is usually defined by a set of features, use cases, or requirements that specify what the product needs to do and how well it needs to do it. Reducing the Size of Human-Generated Code Component-based technology is a general term for reducing the size and complexity of human-generated code necessary to achieve a software solution. Reducing the size of custom-developed software usually increases understandability, reliability, and the ease of making changes. The fundamental impact of object-oriented technology has been in reducing the overall size and complexity of what needs to be developed through more formalized notations for capturing and visualizing software abstractions. In short, visual modeling helps improve a team's ability to manage software complexity. In order to achieve success, real-world software projects require an incredibly complex web of sequential and parallel steps. The conventional software process was characterized by transitioning through sequential phases, from requirements to design to code to test, achieving 100 percent completion of each artifact at each life-cycle stage. A modern process framework attacks the primary sources of the diseconomy ... Software systems are the ultimate delivery vehicle of IT value.http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsla_whitepaper.pdf. Software embodies and automates the lifeblood of an organiza-tion – its business processes – and manages the information on which those processes depend. The rapid delivery of new and enhanced software systems, and their efficient and effective management once in production, is a critical IT process. An organization’s software lifecycle process can be a compara-tive business agility advantage if executed better than the com-petition; software-supported business processes can be rapidly adjusted in response to changing market conditions. In addition to the tremendous efficiency gains achieved through server consolidation and increased utilization of data center resources, organizations that deploy VMware Infrastructure technology in the data center lay the founda-tion for fundamental enhancements to their software lifecycle process. VMware Lab Manager, VMware VirtualCenter and VMware Workstation work together to form the industry’s only complete, closed-loop system for software lifecycle automation by leveraging the encapsulation, mobility and insulation prop-erties of virtual machines hosted on the VMware Infrastructure platform. The enterprise software lifecycle, illustrated below, refers to the iterative set of processes resulting in the creation, deployment and management of production software systems. Develop: software developers or development teams write new software or modify existing software systems Test: QA teams test new or modi ed software systems to ensure they behave (functional testing) and perform (per-formance testing) as expected Integrate: ... Accessible software is designed to be usable by people who have diverse functional limitations or disabilities.http://www.sas.com/govedu/accessibility_white_paper_091305.pdf. SAS believes that we have a legal, economic, and moral imperative to deliver software that works with assistive technologies. By providing software that is usable by people who have disabilities, SAS promotes the employment prospects of a disadvantaged minority. Global customers who use our software to produce content for distribution on the Web depend on SAS to produce accessible output to meet international guidelines and requirements. To remain competitive in this market, as a vendor to the U.S. Federal Government, SAS recognizes the need to produce accessible software. SAS recognizes that the importance of accessible software is not only based on the need to meet federal and international standards, it’s about improving overall usability throughout the marketplace. Key demographic trends combine to make accessible software a necessity in all market sectors. SAS responds to this expanding user group by designing software that is compatible with assistive technologies. As SAS works to retain valuable employees, our customers reap the benefits of the most talented minds in the software business. The researchers investigated accessibility options that are built into products (such as options that change font size and color) and assistive technologies (specialty hardware and software such as screen readers and voice-recognition products). Coded to platform and industry standards for interaction, SAS software operates in a predictable and intuitive fashion. Our ergonomics department regularly assesses employees’ ... technical guidance to product development Ensuring sound engineering design, process and quality practices are followed.http://www.ogi.edu/graduate_edu/students/careers/jobforms/PacStar.Software.Engineering.Manager.pdf. Ensure sound security engineering practices are followed Overseeing software certification processes Deliver finished, high quality, and compelling software products. Building and leading engineering groups, contractors and 3rd party vendors development projects Provide leadership to the software engineering team for your product area. Work closely with the executive team to define product direction. This includes in-depth engineering analysis of networking equipment, networking software, and network monitoring and management software. Work closely with product managers to ensure development meets or exceeds customer requirements. Provide sound decision making for software engineering and product development, sensitive to the constraints and needs of the business Drive overall architecture, security and certifications of software products Manage the group software engineering schedules Monitor technology trends such as emerging standards for new technology opportunities Develop and execute software engineering plans, and manage software engineering schedules and resource allocation and budget. Ensure, and create as needed, software engineering processes, practices and operations to ensure reproducible development and high quality, while keeping costs under control Engage in hands-on, in-depth analysis, review and design of the software, including technical review and analysis of source code. Provide employee development and teambuilding Provide employee coaching and mentoring Drive hiring, ... Developing software for wireless devices is challenging.http://www.wirelessdesignmag.com/pdfs/wdd0606_coverstory.pdf. Cost considera-tions limit system resources in terms of CPU performance, memory, storage, power and bandwidth, putting pressure on software engineers to develop code that optimizes resource usage efficiency. Supporting different displays can force painstaking changes to multiple software modules and applications. These challenges are well-known and have been partially addressed by in-house and commercial software efforts to devel-op various abstraction techniques and APIs. These efforts have helped shield software developers from underlying hardware and software platform-specifics. Consequences include increased programming complexity and development costs, as well as decreased software flexi-bility and portability. Mired in data-man-agement implementation details, it is hard-er for software engineers to take a wider system-level view of how their device man-ages data. Application frameworks designed and optimized for embedded data management can abstract data management coding from tedious data-management implementation details in C/C++ and provide a solid foundation for data-centric software design and devel-opment approaches. Data-centric Software Design For almost all projects, software devel-opment costs and time-to-market are crit-ical concerns. A very promising approach for addressing these issues is data-centric software design. In contrast to traditional approaches where functions are treated as central and the data structures as support for the functions, data-centric software design puts data at the center with code in support of it. Data-centric software ... NeST Group is a global corporation operating in the IT Sector providing hardware and software solutions to customers worldwide.http://www.nestsoftware.com/Write-ups/ProductdevelopmentCapabilities.pdf. The group started its operations in 1991 with the flagship company Sun Fiber Optics, manufacturing couplers and connecters for the Optical Fiber Industry. Subsequently, NeST has grown to offer products and solutions to different market verticals. Our offerings include software, electronics hardware and fiber optic products and application services. NeST is a one-stop shop for end-to-end IT solutions. Our product development expertise includes: hardware and software, prototyping, fabrication and mass production for the product. Once the conceptualization and design process is over, the prototype is developed and tested. The whole product development effort consists fairly large amount of product integration through progressive assembly of product components, in incremental stages, according to defined integration sequences and procedures. With its core processes based on the CMMI framework, NeST is ideally poised to leverage the competency in each of these areas of product development life cycle. NeST has also gained sufficient experience in Inter Group Coordination through execution of turnkey project for a number of customers. To our customers NeST is the one-stop solutions provider for the entire gamut of operations in the product development lifecycle. The software arm of NeST Group, Network Systems & Technologies is an international systems engineering and application development firm committed to delivering high quality, cost effective solutions that fit customers' needs on time, and every ... Because storage products in this new era require increased sophistication in the internal services that they provide, and because the degree of performance and capability in off-the-shelf computing and Operating System platforms has crossed a beneficial threshold, there is shift from storage product development being a predominantly hardware-oriented development paradigm to being software-dominated.http://www.breakthrough.com/technology/FirmwareFoundry-OLD.pdf. New storage directions and next-generation storage products are becoming principally about software, not hardware. In the same way that hardware has become commoditized, so has Operating Systems and other infrastructure software. Commoditization of hardware and software evens the playing field for storage vendors – it no longer takes a firm with the development might of, say, IBM or HP to offer innovative storage solutions. The remainder of this paper introduces a new approach toward developing embedded storage software/firmware built expressly to address these factors. Now, with the hardware element of the storage product increasingly being an off-the-shelf component, the bulk of the calendar impact and onus of development pressure is increasingly on the software team. The software lifecycle of storage products is one of frenetically-paced ad hoc rollouts. New Product Development: From product requirements, an engineering team engages in standard software development process over a project schedule, culminating in delivery of a firmware version for embedding into the storage product. Subsequent Product Development: From product requirements for a new storage product, the software development process proceeds very much ... Since the "cottage" industry era of the late 1970's, software has been establishing itself as an integral part of many scientific and business disciplines.http://www.abelia.com/docs/12207cpt.pdf. However, environments for developing and managing software have been proliferating for lack of a uniform framework for managing and engineering software. The International Standard fills that critical need by establishing a common framework that can be used by software practitioners to manage and engineer software. Besides, such a uniform framework would promote international trade in software products and services. The standard establishes a top-level architecture of the life cycle of software. The life cycle begins with an idea or a need that can be satisfied wholly or partly by software and ends with the retirement of the software. A process is considered to be the responsibility of a party in the software life cycle. To begin with, the standard treats all activities, including those related to quality, as an integral part of the software life cycle. Software is treated as an integral part of the total system and performs certain functions in that system. The standard, however, is designed so as to be tailorable or adaptable for a software project of lesser size or complexity. It is also designed to be used whether the software is a stand-alone entity, or an embedded or integral part of a parent system. It accomplishes this by providing a top-level, open architecture of the life cycle of software. It can be used to develop software that would serve as an application system or a prototype system. Since the advent of software on the scientific and business fields, ... This paper describes the role of the quality organization in software development as observed in dozens of commercial organizations.http://www.softwarequalitymethods.com/Papers/Org_Role.pdf. About the Author Mr. Douglas Hoffman has been in the software engineering and quality assurance fields for over 20 years. He is currently an independent consultant with Software Quality Methods, and specializes in identifying the appropriate development processes and tools for software quality based upon organizational requirements. The purpose, or mission, of software quality organizations ranges from testing products to providing information and expertise about the product and development process. Various tasks for the software quality group are covered, and the order in which they typically appear as the organizations grow and mature is outlined. The roles of software quality assurance can be described with the tasks they undertake. The roles range from acting as an extension of development for debugging software products, to development process definition and control. Verification and validation, acceptance testing, measurement and metrics, and process consulting are also roles that software quality groups sometimes assume. In the most extreme case, the group is acting as a debugging function for development, with little or no effect on the cause of quality in the software. Armed with the information provided by the metrics, the quality group can begin to assure that the software is of good quality. For example, the classic waterfall approach to software development is most appropriate when the requirements can be fully known before beginning development, and they don't ... The software product development industry has evolved to become one of the most important industries of our time.http://www.rallydev.com/documents/rally_whitepaper.pdf. Simply, it is their ability to more quickly create and deliver software products that better address their customer’s real needs. The answer lies deep inside the software development process itself, and we have observed that those who master this demanding and difficult process are most likely to emerge as the winners. Fortunately, we can address this dilemma by implementing software practices that are more adaptive, more agile and most importantly, more visible to the key stakeholders who depend on the outcome. An iteration is a sequence of development activities conducted according to a plan and evaluation criteria that culminates in the delivery of a self-consistent, integrated and tested increment of software. Surely a process that produces observable and measurable increments of software frequently has a competitive advantage over any process that does not. In later sections, we’ll distill these into a set of common practices that create a method-independent framework which can be applied by most software teams. The software application evolves in this fashion with the benefit of regular and continuous feedback. Each iteration is a short period during which a subset of the system’s requirements is elaborated, designed, coded and tested, culminating in the delivery of an integrated, useful increment of software. The most important benefit is that time boxing introduces a near-term milestone that forces both the team and code lines to converge and actually deliver working software at regular intervals. By ... Abstract.http://www.phruby.com/publications/ECOOP98_Springer.pdf. This paper explains the structure of a project repository, which enables you to trace business processes and business rules to the architecture and design of the software system. The structure identifies types and instances of business processes, which are mapped to software design artifacts by means of refinements, realizations and collaborations at different levels of abstraction. Even when using a visual modeling language such as UML, a useful specification of a business system is based on precisely defined design artifacts, rather than on diagrams. The design artifact determines the information about the business system, and the diagram is a representation of the design artifact. Some design artifacts are represented graphically in UML, some are represented by text or tables and some can be represented in a number of different ways. For example, the class lifecycle can be represented by a statechart diagram, an activity diagram, state transition table or in Backus-Naur form. The object interactions can be represented by sequence diagrams or by collaboration diagrams. The class responsibility is represented by text. Fig. 1 shows relationships between design artifacts specifying business processes and logical design of the software system. The realization of the organizational business process is specified by the interactions between the software system and its users (team roles) see the dependency «realize» in Fig. 1. The system level specifies the context of the software system and its relationships to its actors. The system model specifies relationships between the software system and actors ... The challenges facing software development organizations are well documented in articles and conference speeches.http://www.ksinc.com/articles/RADicalSoftware.pdf. But RAD can be the catalyst for more far-reaching change, a RADical change, transformation, or re-engineering of how organizations develop software. Second, to show how RADical project success, viewed within the larger organizational context, can be a catalyst for a more general transformation of software development processes. We have described RADical Software Development as: A customer-driven application development lifecycle that: delivers quality solutions is an evolutionary process uses continuous application engineering techniques is performed by a dedicated professional team uses timeboxed project management JAD sessions have been touted for years as an important technique for gathering specifications (or design or other information) for software applications. So to succeed in the software development business, we must build high quality software, and that quality must be defined (primarily) by the customer. And whether we like it or not, whether we think it is fair or not, the one item that dissatisfies most customers of software products is speed of delivery. If we are to attain processes that produce software at higher speeds, we first need to closely examine the beliefs or attitudes about “control” . In large, multiple project software development organizations, how much time loss is due to control points in development? There are four key aspects to re-engineering the software development process. The overall process, the software development life cycle, must undergo a transformation ... Many companies have at one time or another wanted to increase efficiency of their operation by automating and improving their business processes.http://www.infranetcorp.com/f/EWMvsTraditionalProgramming.pdf. Until recently, the traditional approach has been to undertake a custom software solution. Traditional Custom Software Development Approach The process for developing custom software, when followed correctly is very long, expensive and tedious. To correctly design, build and test custom software, an organization will use the following steps: ▪ Gather Requirements œ a software architect talks to the various potential users of a system to identify the business and data requirements, and to decide which processes can be automated, refined, etc. ▪ Prototype œ in order to guarantee that the software is built to the business requirements and that at the same time the software created is user-friendly, a prototype is necessary, even for very small applications. ▪ Application / System Testing œ once all programming is done, final testing takes place to validate data, make sure the software lives up to the requirements, etc. ▪ Documentation and Delivery œ Depending on the size and scope of the software, documentation may or may not be delivered for the software. Many times after six months of development, business requirements change and the software is ready to go through another phase of enhancements which can mean going back through this same process. EWM Development vs Traditional Software Development Software Development with Enterprise Workflow Manager In contrast to the traditional software development methodology, EWM projects are drastically simplified and streamlined. EWM built ... We consider what aspects of software performance can be validated during the early stages of development, before the system is fully implemented, and how this can be approached.http://www.perfeng.com/papers/smitwood.pdf. There are mature and successful methods available for immediate use, but there are also difficult aspects that need further research. Ease of use and integration of performance engineering with software development are important examples. Validation: The process of evaluating a system or component during or at the end of the development process to determine whether it satisfies specified requirements. The techniques in pre-implementation stages require construction and evaluation of models of the anticipated performance of the final system. The large number of uncertainties introduce the risk of model omissions: models only reflect what you know to model, and the omissions may have serious performance consequences. Thorough modeling studies may require extensive effort to study the many variations of operational scenarios possible in the final system. Research is needed on questions such as tests for realism, testability, completeness and consistency of performance requirements; on methodology for capturing them, preferably in the context of a standard software notation such as UML, and on the construction of performance tests from the requirements. This is an element of the art of performance modelling, which is not well diffused among software developers. These may be changes to the execution platform, to the software design, or to the requirements. Changes to the software design may be to reduce the cost of individual operations, or to reduce ...
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