Software Development Life Cycle Models and Design Techniques Essay

Software Development Life Cycle Models and Design Techniques - Essay Example Let us take a look at the contemporary models being used by the software industry. This is the first derivative of the classic Software Development Life Cycle model which goes through the processes of requirement capturing and analysis, System Analysis and Design, Code Generation, testing and maintenance. Water fall model (Royce,1970) differs from the sequential software development life cycle in inserting iteration at the end of every phase to reduce large iterations over several phases which could turn out to be costly exercises. It also provides for a validation at the end of every phase output, defining the deliverables at the end of every phase. In this process, incremental development was introduced for both requirement capturing and for development, along with a clear validation at the end of every phase made this process more successful than the sequential SDLC. Software projects more controllable. This model, though under use in various unofficial forms across the developing community, became a standard process in 1991. (Pomberger,1991). The phased model that was introduced in the waterfall model was seen more as an iterative possibility. At the end of every phase, a prototype was made and shown to the customer. ... During this methodology, experiments are conducted on the prototype at every iteration to check the effectiveness of the prototype for various functionalities expected out of the system. This way when the customer receives the software, he is very satisfied. 4.0 Object Oriented Life Cycle Model In this model, we do not train our eyes on the functionalities of the software needed, rather on the objects that we have and we can construct. After the requirement analysis, which is very similar to the other models discussed earlier, the objects are identified and development is taken up for those objects that need to be done fresh. Others that could be inherited, are taken from the earlier objects already existing. Advantages of this life cycle is that, since it inherits and reuses many of the objects already existing, the development cycle time should be coming down. By the same measure, it should also bring down the time to test, the time to maintain and the time to make changes in the software. Primarily, this model postulates reusability of objects and classes within programs / projects and across programs / projects2. Clubbing with the prototyping model, most of the common object models use prototyping of individual classes / objects with their performances resulting in easy spotting of errors and inconsistencies early on. Error fixing and modifications are much more easily understood and presented under such conditions resulting in easier fixes. 5.0 Design Techniques Derr (1995) is the first major proponent of the object model that follows the following steps to reach design solutions: 1. A Problem Statement 2. Identify object classes and their attributes 3. Discard unnecessary classes and attributes 4. Inherit