Entire Software Development Process Research Articles

Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC)

Abstract: The software development life cycle (SDLC) process plays an important role in the development and delivery of a software product. This research article provides an in-depth analysis of various SDLC approaches and their unique capabilities, benefits, and challenges. By reviewing traditional and modern SDLC models,this article aims to provide insight to software developers, project managers, and project partners to help them make decisions. Information and development into the entire software development process.

Identifying Possible Improvements of Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) Process of a Bank by Using Process Mining

Software development with its unique characteristics having knowledge-intensive and human-oriented aspects and complex domains, challenges organizations. The timely outcomes with high quality and desired cost that directly affect customer satisfaction have an important place in many organizations, including banks. In the last decade, as an emerging technique for business processes management, process mining has been applied in many domains, including manufacturing, supply chain, government, healthcare, and software engineering. There are limited number of studies on process mining techniques carried out for the software process, especially in the banking sector. A lack of tool infrastructure enabling to run the entire software development process and the challenges in integrating processed data from separated varying tools and assets complicate the use of process mining for software processes. This paper aims to identify the improvement points in the software development process of the Kuveyt Turk Participation Bank in Turkey through the surfacing actions. The findings and results are gathered by the application of process mining techniques of bupaR, and evaluation is provided by experts in the bank. After that, the relevant process improvements are identified. The results of this paper show that using process mining provides the organization with beneficial results, in particular, and a comprehensive view of the end-to-end Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) processes.

An accelerating PSO algorithm based test data generator for data-flow dependencies using dominance concepts

One of the most important and effort intensive activity of the entire software development process is software testing. The effort involved chiefly increases because of the need to obtain optimal test data out of the entire search space of the problem under testing. Software test data generation is one area that has seen tremendous research in terms of automation and optimization. Generating or identifying an optimal test set that satisfies a more robust adequacy criteria, like data flow testing, is still a challenging task. A number of heuristic and meta-heuristics like GA, PSO have been applied to optimize the test data generation problem. GA, although more popular, has its own difficulties such as complex to implement and slow convergence rate. In this paper an accelerating particle swarm optimization algorithm (APSO) is applied to generate test data for data-flow dependencies of a program guided by a new fitness function. APSO is used because of its capability of balancing in exploration and exploitation. A new fitness function is designed based on the concepts of dominance relations, weighted branch distance for APSO to guide the search direction. A set of benchmark programs and four modules of Krishna Institute of Engineering and Technology ERP system were taken for the experimental analysis. The experimental results show that the proposed APSO based approach performed significantly better than random search, genetic algorithm and PSO in enhancing the convergence speed.

An Adaptive PSO Algorithm Based Test Data Generator for Data-Flow Dependencies using Dominance Concepts

One of the most important and effort intensive activity of the entire software development process is software testing. The effort involved chiefly increases because of the need to obtain optimal test data out of the entire search space of the problem under testing. Software test data generation is one area that has seen tremendous research in terms of automation and optimization. Generating or identifying an optimal test set that satisfies a more robust adequacy criteria, like data flow testing, is still a challenging task. A number of heuristic and meta-heuristics like genetic algorithm (GA), Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) have been applied to optimize the test data generation problem. GA, although more popular, has its own difficulties such as complex to implement and slow convergence rate. In this paper an Adaptive Particle Swarm Optimization (APSO) algorithm is applied to generate test data for data-flow dependencies of a program guided by a novel fitness function. Adaptive PSO is used because of its capability of balancing in exploration and exploitation. A new fitness function is designed based on the concepts of dominance relations, weighted branch distance for APSO to guide the search direction. A set of benchmark programs and four modules of Krishna Institute of Engineering and Technology (KIET), Enterprise resource planning (ERP) system were taken for the experimental analysis. The experimental results show that the proposed adaptive PSO based approach performed significantly better than random search, Genetic Algorithm and PSO in enhancing the convergence speed.

Controlling Information Flows During Software Development

Information flow control (IFC) is useful in preventing information leakage during software execution. Our survey reveals that no IFC model is applied on the entire software development process. Applying an IFC model on the entire software development process offers the following features: (1) viewpoints of all stakeholders (i.e., customers and analysts) can be included and (2) the IFC model helps correcting statements that may leak information during every development phase. In addition that no IFC model is applied to the entire software development process, we failed to identify an IFC model that can reduce runtime overhead. According to the above description, we designed a new IFC model named PrcIFC (process IFC). PrcIFC is applied on the entire software development process. Moreover, PrcIFC is disabled after software testing to reduce runtime overhead.

Applying genetic algorithm to increase the efficiency of a data flow-based test data generation approach

The success or failure of the entire software development process relies on the software testing component which is responsible for ensuring that the software that is released is free from bugs. One of the major labor intensive activities of software testing is the generation of the test data for the purpose of applying the testing methodologies. Many approaches have been tried and tested for automating the process of generating the test data. Meta-heuristics have been applied extensively for improving the efficiency of the process. This paper analyses the effectiveness of applying genetic algorithms for generating test data automatically using data flow testing approach. An incremental coverage measurement method is used to improve the convergence.

Training Soft Skills to Project Managers An Experience Report

The success of software projects is driven by the magical triangle between time, budget, and quality. While short term thinking focuses on time and budget, it is quality that has the most important impact on long term customer satisfaction. Thus, providing good quality software is crucial for success. Quality is influenced by several factors. It depends on the entire software development process and related activities (e.g., requirements management, configuration management, design controls, etc.). However, quality cannot be forced from outside. It is well known, but often forgotten, that it is the team and its relation to the project manager that decides on success or failure of a project. Improving the skills of the project managers improves the quality of the products. The limiting factor usually is not related to technical skills that can be trained quite easily. In fact, project management is all about communication and leadership competencies which are far more difficult (but not impossible) to train. In this paper, the author reports on experiences with this kind of training from an industrial point of view. In particular, the author describes what was most helpful and where the major difficulties lay.

Application of Fuzzy Time Series in Prediction of Time Between Failures & Faults in Software Reliability Assessment

Since last seventies, various software reliability growth models (SRGMs) have been developed to estimate different measures related to quality of software like: number of remaining faults, software failure rate, reliability, cost, release time, etc. Most of the exiting SRGMs are probabilistic. These models have been developed based on various assumptions. The entire software development process is performed by human being. Also, a software can be executed in different environments. As human behavior is fuzzy and the environment is changing, the concept of fuzzy set theory is applicable in developing software reliability models. In this paper, two fuzzy time series based software reliability models have been proposed. The first one predicts the time between failures (TBFs) of software and the second one predicts the number of errors present in software. Both the models have been developed considering the software failure data as linguistic variable. Usefulness of the models has been demonstrated using real failure data.

Effective Independent Quality Assessment using IV&V

Software is critical to the effectiveness, competitiveness, and survival of any organization. Unexpected behavior or critical problems that bring operations to an idle are just not an option. Effective oversight is critical to good project management and as it is important for the project manager to ensure that the project is on track and to be completed within the estimated schedule and cost by maintaining the quality of the deliverables. This paper describes the role of Independent Verification and Validation (IV&V) integrated into the software development life cycle in bringing down company’s cost to develop software products, improve the quality of developed systems and save money throughout the system life cycle by detecting and identifying risk elements throughout the entire software development process thus allowing project and quality assurance managers to respond quickly in order to mitigate risks earlier in the product development life cycle, with more effectiveness, and with less impact on cost and schedule.

Generalized Software Security Framework

Security of information has become a major concern in today's digitized world. As a result, effective techniques to secure information are required. The most effective way is to incorporate security in the development process itself thereby resulting into secured product. In this paper, we propose a framework that enables security to be included in the software development process. The framework consists of three layers namely; control layer, aspect layer and development layer. The control layer illustrates the managerial control of the entire software development process with the help of governance whereas aspect layer recognizes the security mechanisms that can be incorporated during the software development to identify the various security features. The development layer helps to integrate the various security aspects as well as the controls identified in the above layers during the development process. The layers are further verified by a survey amongst the IT professionals. The professionals concluded that the developed framework is easy to use due to its layered architecture and, can be customized for various types of softwares.

Using Bounded Model Checking for Coverage Analysis of Safety-Critical Software in an Industrial Setting

Testing and Bounded Model Checking (BMC) are two techniques used in Software Verification for bug-hunting. They are expression of two different philosophies: testing is used on the compiled code and it is more suited to find errors in common behaviors, while BMC is used on the source code to find errors in uncommon behaviors of the system. Nowadays, testing is by far the most used technique for software verification in industry: it is easy to use and even when no error is found, it can release a set of tests certifying the (partial) correctness of the compiled system. In the case of safety critical software, in order to increase the confidence of the correctness of the compiled system, it is often required that the provided set of tests covers 100% of the code. This requirement, however, substantially increases the costs associated to the testing phase, since it often involves the manual generation of tests. In this paper we show how BMC can be productively applied to the Software Verification process in industry. In particular, we show how to productively use a Bounded Model Checker for C programs (CBMC) as an automatic test generator for the Coverage Analysis of Safety Critical Software. In particular, we experimented CBMC on a subset of the modules of the European Train Control System (ETCS) of the European Rail Traffic Management System (ERTMS) source code, an industrial system for the control of the traffic railway, provided by Ansaldo STS. The Code of the ERTMS/ETCS, with thousands of lines, has been used as trial application with CBMC obtaining a set of tests satisfying the target 100% code coverage, requested by the CENELEC EN50128 guidelines for software development of safety critical systems. The use of CBMC for test generation led to a dramatic increase in the productivity of the entire Software Development process by substantially reducing the costs of the testing phase. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that BMC techniques have been used in an industrial setting for automatically generating tests achieving full coverage of Safety-Critical Software. The positive results demonstrate the maturity of Bounded Model Checking techniques for automatic test generation in industry.

Integrating Application Security into Software Development

It's difficult to transition application security initiatives from identifying vulnerabilities after software has been produced to proactively mitigating vulnerabilities during the entire software development process. Learn about a simple approach for introducing application security into ongoing software development projects.

Reuse in Software Development Organizations in Latvia

Reuse in Software Development Organizations in Latvia The paper presents the results of a survey, which aims to investigate the field of software reuse in software development organizations in Latvia. The topic has a particular significance since reuse may provide some economic benefits by reducing software development and operating costs, and by efficient utilization of development knowledge and corporate expertise. The objective of the study is to identify the key factors to be considered by the companies interested in establishing a software reuse program, thus improving time-to-market, costs and quality of software products by ingraining reuse into the entire software development process. Twenty factors organized into four categories were considered important within the framework of the survey. The results were obtained through the questionnaire involving software organizations in Latvia, whose responses were analyzed and used to relate the characteristics of organizations with their reuse experience. As a result, the influence of the selected factors on the success of the reuse is evaluated using four different levels (strong, weak, none, no data). Additionally, the paper includes review of related researches and comparison of the results. In conclusion, the author provides suggestions for the improvement of the reuse in Latvian software development organizations on the basis of the survey.

Maintenance-oriented design and development: a case study

Maintenance efforts are the most time and resource consuming of the entire software development process. The authors propose a different point of view that shifts the traditional perspective and thinks of the implementation stage as maintenance as well. They present a case study of the development of educational video games for children to determine the proposed method's benefits and drawbacks in this domain.

SOFL: a formal engineering methodology for industrial applications

Formal methods have yet to achieve wide industrial acceptance for several reasons. They are not well integrated into established industrial software processes, their application requires significant abstraction and mathematical skills, and existing tools do not satisfactorily support the entire formal software development process. We have proposed a language called SOFL (Structured-Object-based-formal Language) and a SOFL methodology for system development that attempts to address these problems using an integration of formal methods, structured methods and object oriented methodology. Construction of a system uses structured methods in requirements analysis and specifications, and an object based methodology during design and implementation stages, with formal methods applied throughout the development in a manner that best suits their capabilities. The paper describes the SOFL methodology, which introduces some substantial changes from current formal methods practice. A comprehensive, practical case study of an actual industrial Residential Suites Management System illustrates how SOFL is used.

Object‐Oriented Finite Element and Graphics Data‐Translation Facility

Object-oriented approaches have emerged as one of the most promising paradigms for developing software. The approach has gained popularity in a number of fields in computer science, such as programming languages, data bases, artificial intelligence, knowledge representation, office automation, and computer-aided design (CAD). Recently, object-oriented approaches have been applied to develop integrated computer-aided civil engineering systems. This paper describes our experience developing software using an object-oriented approach to integrate finite element and graphics application programs, which are to become parts of an integrated civil engineering system. The short-term objective of the project is to develop a general-purpose data-translation facility for finite element and graphics-based programs. The long-term objective of the project is to investigate the effectiveness and viability of object-oriented approaches to integrate programs from various activities in engineering of a constructed facility. Our experiences have resulted in several practical ideas and revealed some points that are difficult to comprehend without actually going through the entire software development process.

An IBM PC based programmer workstation

A software system is described automating the entire software development process on an IBM personal computer, from the program design stage to delivery and maintenance of the finished product.

Evaluation method for user requirements documents

The specification generated during the requirements specification phase acts as a cornerstone for the entire software development process. The quality of this document directly influences the overall quality of the resulting software product. The process of requirements specification uses as its input a natural language requirements document, generated by the system's users. This document serves as a guide to the actual specification process. A method is presented for the evaluation and analysis of this document. This analysis permits improvements to be made in the initial requirements document before its use in a formalized specification paradigm. By improving the quality of this document, the input to the specification process is enhanced. This enhancement strengthens not only the developed specification, but also the entire software development process.

A project-oriented undergraduate course sequence in software engineering

The design of a two-semester course sequence in software engineering is described. These courses, offered at the undergraduate level, are centered around student projects developed in conjunction with local industry; the projects are used as a focal point to motivate and teach software engineering concepts and tools. The goal of the courses is to provide the student with an overview of the entire software development process, experience as a member of a project team, and exposure to a real-world software environment. This paper describes the course organization and topics, and techniques for project selection and monitoring. Results and experience gained to date with this approach are also discussed.

Standards considered helpful

Software development standards have been adopted in several professional software shops to facilitate the entire software development process. These standards encompass all aspects of software development, including design, documentation, coding and testing techniques. It has been reported by these software houses that implementation of standards for software design and programming has increased productivity and resulted in better quality software products After some experimentation, it appears that a scientific approach from the very beginning to the end of the development process has to be taken. Instructors should work very closely with the students as each phase of the process is developed. Courses should be integrated so that the life of a program does not end as soon as a course is over. Maybe programs written in one course should be used in developing programs in another course. Perhaps there should be users (such as another class) for the programs developed. For our scientific approach to software development in the academic setting, we are advocating a consistent set of standards and its implementation by every faculty member. In the rest of the paper we justify the need for standards, specify the types of standards and suggest methods of implementation.