Chapter 12 - The Development Process

Abstract

This chapter describes the fundamental characteristics and methods of evolutionary system development with prototyping. Professional software development is organized as projects that can differ considerably in their orientation. Direct user integration, prototyping, and informal reviews are carried out by project team members in conjunction with the users. Formal reviews, pair-programming, and refactoring are techniques used within the actual developer teams. Besides the factors that assure the quality of a software product in the process, there are procedures and techniques that relate directly to the product itself. Design by contract plays a key role and is used as early as the domain design and is reflected in the concrete programming. Historically, the “waterfall model” was the first process model for software development and still shapes the thinking of many software developers and managers. The “spiral model” is regarded as an important improvement to the waterfall model. An alternative to the waterfall or spiral model is the “idealized evolutionary process model.” It can be thought of as a fundamental reorientation of the software development process. In the evolutionary model, the different activities of the management process are closely oriented toward the activities of the development process. The evolutionary approach of the Tools & Materials (T&M) process can be seen as an application-oriented interpretation of the Unified Process (UP).