Software Engineering Challenges

To support discussion

Interaction diagram

The dynamic behavior of the system and how it responds to events

To define the boundary between the system and its environment

Context bubble, external entities, and data flows

Structural diagram

To represent a discrete task that involves interaction with an external system

They must be accurate and complete

Identifying software requirements, prioritizing them for development, and reviewing the backlog to ensure it meets their needs.

To share information, describe progress since the last sprint, problems that have risen, and what is planned for the day.

A state of software that is finished and no further work is needed to incorporate into the final work.

Customers have limited time, and may be reluctant to get involved in the testing process.

It keeps the code simple, improves understandability, and makes further changes easier to make.

It develops collective ownership of the software, serves as an informal review process, and encourages refactoring.

To immediately test code changes when added to a larger codebase, and ensure that all unit tests pass.

The amount of product backlog effort that a team can cover in a single sprint.

Developing techniques that can cope with increasing diversity of platforms and execution environments.

Developing software that can be trusted by its users.

Software engineers should not only uphold the law but also follow a set of principles that are morally correct.

Engineers should not publicize information of their employers/clients, regardless of agreement.

Engineers should only accept work that is within their range of skill and competence.

Engineers should be able to protect their employers/clients' intellectual property and be aware of local laws surrounding IP.

Engineers should not use their skills to misuse other people's computers.

Graphics programs, CAD software.

Agile development is designed for small co-located teams, making it less suitable for large worldwide teams.

Verification is a static process ensuring that documents and code meet the conditions of the starting phase, while validation is a dynamic process ensuring that the customer's real requirements are met.

Static testing alone cannot check conformance with a customer's real requirements and cannot check non-functional requirements.

Scaling up is adapting agile methods for large systems that cannot be developed by a small team.

A plan-driven approach is preferred when it is important to have a very detailed specification before moving to implementation.

The author walks through the code and explains what each piece does.

Agile development lacks product documentation, relying on the development team's knowledge of what needs to be done.

Scaling out is introducing agile methods around a large organisation with years of software development experience.

To identify flaws from a security point of view, ensuring confidentiality, integrity, authentication, availability, authorization, and non-repudiation.

Portability testing is determining the difficulty of transferring software from one hardware/software/other to another efficiently and effectively. The two strategies for portability testing are transferring an installed software from one computer to another and building executable files to run the software on different platforms.

Functional testing focuses on validating the behavior of the application, while non-functional testing focuses on validating the performance of the application.

To validate the software's performance, such as how fast the dashboard loads.

Manual testing is executed by manual testing, while automated testing is hard to do manually.

The focus area of functional testing is based on customer requirements.

Unit testing and smoke testing are examples of functional testing, which validate the behavior of the application.

The dashboard should load in 2 seconds.