The Existing Software Development Methodology

Software development methodology is the progression of generating new software solutions or modifying current software solutions. Software can be designed and developed in many ways. The methodology taken to design and develop a software package can differ from the very simple, limited planning method to a very detailed, formal and structured method. They are several existing software development methodologies such as agile, scrum, waterfall and rapid application development.

Any software methodology must contain the following four activities which is software specification, software design and implementation, software verification and validation, and software evolution. Software specification is defining the main functionalities of the software and the pressures around them. Software design and implementation is the software is to be intended and programmed. Software verification and validation the software must obeys to its specification and meets the customer needs. Lastly, software evolution is the software is being altered to meet client and market requirements changes.

In practice, they consist of sub-activities such as requirements validation, architectural design, unit testing. There are also supporting activities such as configuration and change management, quality assurance, project management, user experience. Along with other activities purpose to expand the above activities by introducing innovative techniques, tools, following the best practice, method standardization. When we talk about a process, we usually talk about the activities in it. Nevertheless, a process also includes the process description, which includes products the consequences of an activity. For instance, the consequence of architectural design maybe a model for the software architecture. Secondly, roles the errands of the people involved in the process. For instance, the project manager, programmer. Thirdly, pre and post conditions the conditions that must be factual before and after an activity. For instance, the pre-condition of the architectural design is the necessities have been approved by the client, while the post condition is the diagrams describing the architectural have been reviewed.

Software process is complex, it depends on making decisions. There’s no ideal method and most organizations have developed their own software development. For example, an organization works on critical systems has a very structured process, while with business systems, with quickly changing requirements, a less formal, flexible progression is likely to be more effective.

First, the agile methodology refers to a group of software development models based on the incremental and iterative methodology, in which the increments are small and stereotypically, new releases of the system are formed and made obtainable to customers every few weeks. They include customers in the development process to suggest requirements changes. They minimize documentation by using informal communications rather than formal meetings with written documents. They are best suited for application where the requirements change quickly during the development progression.

Furthermore, Scrum is simplified by a scrum master, whose main job is to remove weaknesses to the capability of the team to deliver the sprint goal. Scrum permits the creation of self-organizing teams by encouraging verbal communication across all team members and disciplines that are involved in the project. A key principle of scrum is its acknowledgment that basically experimental challenges cannot be addressed successfully in a traditional “process control” manner. For itself, scrum adopts an empirical method, accepting that the problem cannot be fully understood or well-defined, focusing instead on maximizing the team’s ability to respond in an agile manner to developing challenges.

Next software methodology is the spiral model, which is a risk-driven where the method is represented as spiral rather than a sequence of activities. It was designed to contain the finest features from the waterfall and prototyping models and introduces a new component. Each loop in the spiral represents a phase. Therefore, the initial loop might be concerned with system possibility, the next loop might be concerned with the requirements definition, the next loop with system design, and so on. Spiral model has been very influential in helping people think about repetition in software processes and introducing the risk-driven approach to development. However, the model is rarely used.

The waterfall methodology is a popular version of the systems development life cycle model for software engineering. The waterfall model describes a development method that is rigid and linear. Waterfall development has separate goals for each phase of development where each phase is completed for the next one is started and there is no return. The advantages of the waterfall process are that it allows for departmentalization and decision-making control. A schedule is typically set with limits for each stage of development and a product can proceed through the development process. In theory, this development leads to the project being delivered on time because each phase has been planned in detail. In practice, waterfall development often falls short of prospects as it does not embrace the expected changes and revisions that become essential with most projects. Once an application is in the testing stage, it is very difficult return and change something that was not thought of in the concept stage.

Lastly, Rapid Application Development methodology is a sequential process often using case tools which allows the rapid development of software applications. It requires constant communication between developers and the end users to understand the problem properly. Software produced using the RAD approach is limited to the capabilities of the software used during development. Often programmers are restricted in their ability to operate lower levels of code. RAD generally embraces object-oriented programming methodology, which inherently fosters software reuse.

In contrast, understating each of the varying methodologies available, it is necessary to be able to not only differentiate between each, but also decide on an approach when given a specific situation.