Software Engineering Assignment - Essay Example

Partha Kar Academia-Research, Inc Software Engineering Assignment 4 February 2007 Software Engineering Assignment Answer to section 3 The four attributes which all software products should have are as follows:1. Maintainability: Software must evolve to meet changing demands of customers.2. Dependability: Software must not cause physical or economic damage in the event of system failure.3. Efficiency: Software should be more responsive, optimize processing time, better use of memory, etc.4. Usability: Software must have an user friendly interface and proper documentation.

The four other attributes that may sometimes be significant are portability, robustness, speed and size (Sommerville).Answer to section 1.4Software process is the total set ofsoftware engineering activities necessary to develop and maintain software products. However, software process model is an abstract representation of the architecture and design of the software process (Silvia T Acu, 2004). See figure 1 for a detail picture.CriteriaSoftware processSoftware ProcessModelFocusInvolves software specification, development, validation and evolutionInvolves activities to create a software.

GeneralitySingle model for the developer enterpriseMultiple life cycle modelsDomain & scopeGeneral, enterprise on the wholeSpecific to a part of an enterprise.Figure 1: Difference between Software process and Software process model.The software process model facilitates better management of process resources and decomposes into micro level, into subsystems, to identify internal data flows and external penetrations thus helping in process improvements. Answer to section 2.6 Figure 2: Block diagram of a possible architecture of the system.

Answer to section 3.1The three principal types of critical systems are safety, mission and business critical systems. The failure of safety critical system results in injury and loss of life (for example malfunctioning of a chemical plant) whereas failure of mission critical system results in failure of goal-directed activity (weather forecasting system) and failure of business critical systems (for example accounting system in a bank) results in very high costs for the business using the system.

This is the precise difference. Works CitedSilvia, T Acu. A Process model applicable toSoftware engineering and knowledgeEngineering. Sommerville, Ian. Software Engineering.Pearson Education, 2004.