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“I've been following the development of Eclipse for some time and I'm continually amazed as the extended team hits each projected milestone and ship date with precision.http://www.eclipsecon.org/2004/EclipseCon_2004_TechnicalTrackPresentations/22_Haaland.pdf. Until this experience, I was convinced that such a feat was impossible for a software project of any size and complexity. I've read about the PMC and the published plans and all that, but I've been involved in projects that had plans and leaders that were still significantly later than expected. So... the question is how is this really accomplished? And the immediate follow-up of course is, how can this process be replicated elsewhere? I'm also interested in where this method of development came from, was it part of OTI's culture from the beginning or did it come from IBM? Did it spring from somebody's head fully formed or evolve over time based on project management research? Does it have a name?” “What would it take to have the next version be the most cool and compelling release ever that would not only be good for the eclipse community but also fun to work on?” - Plan ideas were organized and prioritized based on themes The 3.0 plan is a living document and is updated to reflect - Input from the community The plan accurately reflects the teams commitments 6-12 months between major releases Schedule depends on plan objectives Show progress on overall 3.0 priorities Opportunity to re-plan based on new information Teams need to explicitly release versions of their code to be included Intent is that these builds are “good enough” for the eclipse platform developers to use for self hosting A staging process to create ... At the highest level, there are the architecture patterns that define the overall shape and structure of software applications1.http://www.objectmentor.com/resources/articles/Principles_and_Patterns.pdf. Down a level is the architecture that is specifically related to the pur-pose of the software application. There is much more to be said about the principles and patterns that are exposed here. The design of many software applications begins as a vital image in the minds of its designers. Though the designers start out with good intentions, they find that they are shooting at a moving target. The warts and ulcers accumu-late in the new design before it ever makes it to its first release. They are not orthogonal, but are related to each other in ways that will become obvious. What begins as a simple two day change to one module grows into a multi-week marathon of change in module after module as the engineers chase the thread of the change through the application. If the managers turn the engineers loose on such problems, they may disappear for long periods of time. The software design begins to take on some characteristics of a roach motel -- engineers check in, but they don’t check out. Often the breakage occurs in areas that have no conceptual relationship with the area that was changed. Immobility is the inability to reuse software from other projects or from parts of the same project. After much work, the engineers discover that the work and risk required to separate the desirable parts of the software from the undesirable parts are too great to tolerate. It is the dependency architecture that is degrading, and with it the ability of the software to be maintained. Consider Listing 2-1. the ... In the 1990's, the Software industry made a concerted effort to become more process-oriented.http://www.imsi-pm.com/home/library/usecasemgmt.pdf. Standards for measuring and certifying effective software developmental processes were introduced and popularized. An increasing number of software tools were developed to define and apply these new and effective development processes to software application projects. How can we improve the quality of the system we build as our businesses, national economies and daily activities become increasingly dependent on effective and efficient software? This paper suggests that one of the critical elements in delivering software on time and on budget is the identification, implementation and processing of requirements. We'll also explain "Use Case Management" and how it is used in conjunction with requirements to facilitate effective software development and delivery. The price of failure can be enormous if business requirements are not accurately captured for a software development project. Quite a few studies indicate software projects spend roughly one-third of their overall budget correcting errors that originate in the requirement gathering process. Effective requirement management is a key contributor to successfully delivering quality software. A software capability needed by the user to solve a problem or achieve an objective A software capability that must be met or possessed by a system or system component to satisfy a contract specification, standard or other formally imposed documentation A defined operational capability of a system of process that must exist to satisfy a business need. The analyst's challenge is to identify ... Identifying and Meeting the Challenges This article discusses the key challenges of scaling these platforms and outlines how elements such as metadata and software product lines can help meet these challenges.http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/power/ps4q06-20070164-SAP.pdf. flexibility in business software systems by enabling developers to build new services, processes, and applica-tions from existing reusable components. These platforms consist of two basic elements: a technical software plat-form and an application platform. The technical software platform is a set of packaged technical capabilities designed to simplify the so ftware development process; it includes database and network management systems as well as middleware that manaes g transactions, componentization, security, persistence, data transformation, Web services, and so on. The steady rise in the abstraction level of technical software platforms has enabled a similar rise in the abstraction level of program-ming languages and model-driven development tools. The second part, the application platform, sits on top of the technical software platform and consists of frame-works of reusable, executable business-oriented services (such as a post-to-ledger service) and executable busi - ness processes composed of multiple services (such as an order-entry process). Building software from reusable components has often not worked as well in practice as envisioned. Creating applications from reusable components does not solve all the traditional challenges of a software life cycle—in fact, some of these challenges can be exacerbated if not handled properly. Each application component has its own life cycle and version ... Users of information technology today demand software applications that are comprehensive, reliable, responsive, and adaptive to service-oriented, heterogeneous environments.http://www.progress.com/progress_software/products/develop/docs/openedge_architect_0307.pdf. The goal of Progress Software is to maximize the benefits of information technology while minimizing its complexity and total cost of ownership. This is why the software development platform you choose today determines how agile your business will be tomorrow. Progress Software introduces a new and innovative OpenEdge® Architect integrated development environment designed for today’s programmer. Progress Software helps organizations create powerful business applications that respond to changing business and IT conditions.” • Enables multiple projects to be debugged simultaneously to easily compare program flow Meta Catalog There is a common problem among all software development projects: it is impossible for a developer to know all the object relationships within an application. Built on Eclipse, OpenEdge Architect joins an expanding ecosystem of software development tools. For example, if a developer determines that their application would benefit from rigorous software configuration management (SCM) functionality, that developer can acquire a third party plug-in to support their needs. This developer would not have to manage disjointed software components and could seamlessly move between writing business logic in the OpenEdge Editor while managing the application lifecycle with a SCM vendor’s product such as Roundtable. In addition to its high efficiency development tools, Progress Software has a broad user group and technical support community ... The revised series now presents a new streamlined model with an unprecedented focus on software acquisition management and evolutionary acquisition strategies.http://www.armysoftwaremetrics.org/documents/INSIGHT/spring2001.pdf. The software industry has seen an in-crease in the use of new software develop-ment methods and processes during the past several years. As a result, it’s often difficult for analysts to judge the relevance of their estimating methods to the new re-gimes of software development. DoD cost analysts estimate software projects in many different ways, but all need historical information to judge whether or not their estimates are realistic. The revision of the 5000 policies in 1996 places unprecedented emphasis on software acquisition management, as illus-trated in this statement: “Software is a key element in DoD sys-tems. The new DoD Instruction 5000.2 also provides two strong recommendations for the use of evolutionary acquisition for software development: “This approach is particularly useful if software is a key component of the system, and the software is required for the system to achieve its intended mission. The spiral development model has been effectively used in many software development programs to avoid the inherent problems in software require-ments definition. The SIS has conducted a survey of the sta-tus of DoD software training and is cur-rently deliberating proposals to enhance education and training for software acquisi-tion and engineering. The members of the Army Software Test & Evaluation Panel (STEP) who defined the standard set of metrics and recommended mandatory imple-mentation also realized that this was not the way to implement ... This special issue examines how the prolifera-tion and availability of open source are affect-ing software development practices.http://www.computer.org/portal/cms_docs_software/software/content/how.pdf. The most obvious boon of open source to software developers is the opportunity to base a design on existing software elements. The open source community gives us a rich base of reusable software, typically available at the cost of downloading the code from the Inter-net. Furthermore, when software is available in source code form, we can more easily port to our target platform and adjust its interfaces to suit our needs. Movement along all three axes increases the breadth of software reuse opportunities in any development effort. In cases where the software industry is moving toward new technologies such as 64- bit architectures or Unicode character encod-ing, the effort of upgrading reused source code elements might mean large-scale duplication of effort. This can adversely affect prod-ucts that depend on substandard software ele-ments. Some software reposi-tories, such as sourceforge.net, even provide metrics of a project’s activity based on factors such as those just listed. However, adversaries having access to the source can more efficiently locate and ex-ploit vulnerabilities, while the original devel-opers may lack communication channels or re-sources for informing the users of their software about security vulnerabilities (see the “Keep in Touch” sidebar on page 46). However, large open source devel-opment projects increase the visibility, accessi-bility, and adoption prospects of important software engineering processes such as version control, peer reviews, issue tracking, release ... The manual reviewing of source code remains an integral part of most successful software projects.http://www.borland.com/resources/en/pdf/white_papers/together_software_remodeling.pdf. Pairing this manual process with automated techniques available through static source code-level analysis can markedly increase the success of these programs. This is not a new concept, but it is extremely important to the long-term success of software projects. This would seem to imply that if reviews are to be done with an agile process, it is likely that source code would be the only artifact deemed worth reviewing. While many organizations may be unwilling to require programming to be performed in pairs, all can benefit from a reasonable code review program. All too often, they result in lengthy philosophical discussions that typically have little practical foundation. Given that many projects do not have “running” software until the last moment, the chances of effective code reviews being performed at critical periods in the project become increasingly slim. Metric data can help guide these discussions by providing solid information regarding certain aspects of software design. As mentioned above, books can be a valuable source of information regarding the ever-changing landscape of best practices for software coding. While few would argue that Ant is not a successful software project, it is clear that many issues within the source code warrant some attention. While Ant is currently functional software, its readability and maintainability going forward will be increasingly important. Object-oriented programming has matured to the point where it is commonly accepted as the favored paradigm for ... “When you ask people about what it is like being part of a great team what is most striking is the meaningfulness of the experience..... Authors like Peter Senge and John Seely Brown argue that we can harness this learning through “Organisational Learning”, so creating “Learning Organisations” which deliver better businesses - and in our case better software. How does learning relate to software development? If we look at the software development process there are at least four key learning activities: They too will learn, through the software, and acquire new insights into the task that may lead to changes to the software. Learning is thus inherent at every stage of software development. Worse still, none of this guarantees we will actually develop good software. If instead of viewing software development as a problem task we view it as a learning activity we get some new insights. Since software development is intrinsically a learning process it doesn’t seem that great a jump to claim recognising it as such, removing barriers to learning, and promoting learning within our group will improve our software. And although it doesn’t look good when you’re filling in the weekly timesheet the numbers are hiding the learning that occurred during development. (c) Allan Kelly Page 2 of 5 Software development and the learning organisation 28-Feb-03 SE and OL.doc So, we need to accept mistakes will happen, we need to accept that risk. And when we finish and throw the software over the wall, users will start their learning. These are tools of managers who believe that software development is an industrial process. I’ve ... Here we focus on software developers in their tasks of designing, implementing, deploying, and maintaining high quality software-intensive systems where they are physically separated and make use of the Internet as the basis for their interactions.http://www.booch.com/architecture/blog/artifacts/CDE.pdf. In this paper, we examine the points of friction in the software development process and the mechanisms that reduce that friction. The success of distributed teams working together effectively is imperative, and is a distinguishing factor in the success or failure of many modest to large software development organizations. In a very practical sense these tools provide the baseline of collaboration functionality for today’s software developers, though typically augmented with an assortment of open source, proprietary, and commercial stand-alone point products. However, what is different about the emergence of CDEs is the collection of these mechanisms into a virtual project space, delivered over the Web and supplemented with tools and creature comforts that are focused on the mission of that particular team, in this case, the creation of software products. For this reason, understanding more about optimizing software development team performance is a critical task of software engineering. Relative to software development two decades ago, we now better understand the best practices of software development that work and those that do not work. Software developers spend a majority of their time on code-centric activities supported by an IDE offering a range of code development and manipulation features. This study on day in the life of a developer resonates with ... System Development Methodology Reference Often considered the classic approach to the systems development life cycle, the waterfall model describes a development method that is linear and sequential.. Waterfall development has distinct goals for each phase of development. Once a phase of development is completed, the development proceeds to the next phase and there is no turning back. The advantage of waterfall development is that it allows for departmentalization and managerial control. A schedule can be set with deadlines for each stage of development and a product can proceed through the development process like a car in a carwash, and theoretically, be delivered on time. Development moves from concept, through design, implementation, testing, installation, troubleshooting, and ends up at operation and maintenance. Each phase of development proceeds in strict order, without any overlapping or iterative steps. The disadvantage of waterfall development is that it does not allow for much reflection or revision. A concept that products can be developed faster and of higher quality through: Gathering requirements using workshops or focus groups Prototyping and early, reiterative user testing of designs The re-use of software components A rigidly paced schedule that defers design improvements to the next product version Less formality in reviews and other team communication Some companies offer products that provide some or all of the tools for RAD software development. These products include requirements gathering tools, prototyping tools, computer-aided software engineering tools, language development environments such as ... Software development reached a point where it had to be developed by teams.http://www.stsc.hill.af.mil/resources/tech_docs/gsam4/chap10.pdf. The discipline to develop software in this manner is known as software engineering, a com-plex process that itself requires many sub-processes. Software engineering is younger than other engineering disciplines and is based on an industry that is undergoing unbelievable change. It is not possible to sample even the major methods here, but most development methods incorporate, to a greater or lesser degree, a standard set of activities common to most software engineering. Software engineering goes far beyond learning how to write programs with computer languages. The following statement warns of the true position of programming in the scheme of software engineering; there is much more to software development than programming. The software development model used in a project is a portion of the overall project life cycle, and should fit within the project life cycle. However, careful inspection will reveal that it employs the same software engineering activities as the other models. As in every other discipline, planning is an essential skill for developing software. This document is written in natural language (common everyday speech) and de-scribes what the final system or software should do for the users. It is a formalized description of the system, presented in a language that better describes what must be ac-complished in terms of software functionality. Software engineers must come to know the OS that resides on the computer for which they are writing software. Software functionality is worth very little if the user cannot ... Computer software began as machine-specific binary code instructions, or ones and zeroes.http://www.stsc.hill.af.mil/resources/tech_docs/gsam4/chap15.pdf. Thus the first generation of software and programmers were artists as much as anything else, creatively trying to write programs small enough to fit into the limited memory, and fast enough to be useful with the limited processing power. Fourth generation programming has not been fully successful and software is still generally written in procedural languages with some fourth generation additions and other enhancements. Software development is one of the fastest evolving fields of engineering there are. Software develop-ment has become so progressive that its innovations are often applied to other disciplines to help them deal with their own changes. In spite of all this talk of computer programming, the major work of programming a computer is not programming, or writing software code, but software design. Software is now usually very complex in nature and often consists of multiple programs and resource files. Software development also has its own life cycle (see Chapter 2) that further constrains the software design effort, determining what methods can be used and how they can be used. As shown in Figure 15-1, the in-puts to the software design process are the software requirements. The functional design phase converts the Software Requirements Specification, which tells what the software must do, into a functional design specification, describing how to do it. It introduced a whole new way of looking at software and currently forms the basis of most new software de-velopment. These three ... In component-based software development the identification and proper management of interconnections among the pieces of a system becomes a central concern.http://www.rhsmith.umd.edu/faculty/cdell/papers/sast97.pdf. This paper proposes a new perspective for designing software which elevates the representation and management of software component interdependencies to a distinct design problem, orthogonal to that of representing and implementing the core functional pieces of an application. The perspective is based on a taxonomy of common software interconnection dependencies and sets of alternative protocols for managing them. As the size and complexity of software systems grows, the identification and proper management of interconnection dependencies among various pieces of a system has become responsible for an increasingly important part of the development effort. The practical difficulty of achieving wide-spread software reuse is a manifestation of the fact that component integration is not a trivial problem. At the implementation level, software systems are sets of modules in one or more programming languages. This expressive shortcoming of current languages and tools is directly connected to a number of practical problems in software design: Discontinuity between architectural and implementation models. To this end, Section 2 of this paper proposes a framework for studying software component interconnection. The framework is based on software system representations that provide distinct abstractions for components and their interdependencies. The above definitions suggest representations in which software systems are depicted as sets of interdependent ...
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