GAOPANDE - Software Engineering: A Practical Approach

Software Engineering A Practical Approach

Laxmidhar V. Gaopande

Copyright

2020 Laxmidhar V. Gaopande

All rights reserved.

No portion of this book shall be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the author.

Dedication

This book is dedicated to all my colleagues and my team members of various companies where I have worked till date, my parents and my family members who always supported me and who inspired me to write this book. All those colleagues who supported me in carrying out my software engineering research and appreciated my research in software engineering area while executing various assignments for global customers which involved software projects and product engineering work across different technologies and platforms.

Preface

I have executed many software projects and engineering assignments in India and abroad and I have carried out various software engineering researches while doing this work in terms of software development, metrix collection, estimations, project management etc. Lot of this work has been highly appreciated by my managers and my colleagues in various offices and end customers from all over the world. Their appreciation has motivated me to write this book.

I have spent 30+ years in software development and very well conversed with software projects and products of small, medium, large sizes, across different technologies and platforms along with traditional waterfall models to agile development, on site, offshore, dual shore and global delivery models of execution. I thought of sharing my experience with students at undergraduate, graduate level, teachers and practitioners from IT industry.

I have delivered many lectures in software engineering area and also published many papers in national and international conferences.

Readers will see very practical aspects of software engineering in this book and will get immensely benefitted by my experience in this field.

I sincerely feel this book will be very useful and will give good insights in software engineering practice.

Mumbai, India, 2020 Laxmidhar V. Gaopande

Acknowledgements

I like to acknowledge all my colleagues and team members who worked with me in various companies and were part of software development team while executing various software projects and product engineering work for global customers.

I like to acknowledge all those people who helped me to carry out various software engineering experiments and research on various software assignments.

I also like to acknowledge my parents and all my family members who were quite patient and tolerant while I was working on completing this book.

Author Biography

Author, Laxmidhar V. Gaopande has studied Bachelor of Engineering at VNIT Nagpur, Management Diploma at Symbiosis Institute of Business Management, Pune and Master of Technology at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras.

He is in software development area for more than 30+ years and has delivered more than 100+ software projects and products for global Fortune 500 companies from USA, UK, Germany, Israel, India etc. He has worked with Indian MNCs and in USA and UK as a Software Consultant. He has travelled immensely to many countries like USA, UK, Germany, Japan, Singapore, Israel, Italy, South Korea, Netherland, Switzerland, Norway and France till date and has interacted with various companies while doing various software assignments for them.

He has published many papers in software engineering in many national and international conferences and has delivered lectures on various subjects in many educational institutes and conferences in India and abroad. He has also filed many patents in USA.

His was also invited as visiting faculty to teach global MBA students subject of information technology and software engineering by a highly reputed MBA school in Dubai.

He is recipient of many prestigious awards and scholarships in his academic excellence.

Introduction

This book is meant for all kinds of software development professionals, software developers, students, teachers, managers or top executives to understand how important is software engineering in order to develop and deliver in time with high quality keeping in mind what a client needs. The book is written based on rich experience the author has while dealing with global customers from countries like USA, UK, Germany, Israel, Italy and India. It covers 30+ years of authors rich experience in software development and product engineering while dealing with execution of projects and products for global customers.

The book tries to bring all important aspects of software engineering, important areas like software projects types, various delivery models, software development life cycle, quality systems, software requirements, analysis , design and architecture models, usability engineering, user experience, configuration management, release management, risk management, project management, estimation techniques, why projects fail, software support, case studies, exercises and useful data which author has used himself and found extremely useful while dealing with live projects in actual development and execution.

The various case studies are covered with intention of sharing learnings from each project and how that project would have been successful or would have caused little pain that it did actually. The case studies may serve as useful feedback to the readers.

The eighteen exercises at the end of book cover all the topics in this book with assignment of developing a new software system to make the understanding of all the concepts more clear.

Summary of Contents

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The mankind has always seen many evolutions. In case of computers we have seen many generations of computers, in case of software development we have seen many techniques and models of development evolving over the last few years and continue to evolve as technology matures, we have seen different coding languages getting developed and used by developers in different environment, platforms etc. as per the need and rolling out various projects.

Software engineering is a science. It has its own principles to follow in order to make software development a great success. Nothing happens in an adhoc manner, one has to keep on looking at best approaches in every task we do in order to ensure quality. Software engineering is not just a science but it is innovative, scientific, evolving and creative.

Software engineering is the science and art of engineering approach to software development. It involves specifying the requirements of software to be developed, designing, implementing and delivering within various constraints of cost, resources, infrastructure and timelines to meet the functional and non-functional requirements specified to meet the expectations.

The importance of software engineering is not felt immediately to many professionals as they begin their software career as programmers where everyone thinks deep expertise in a given coding language is a key to success. As one matures in his/her software development experience, one realizes that expertise of a language contributes 10 to 20% of overall project success, what are those other areas which impacts 80 to 90% of a project?, they are quality of specification, quality of design, quality of architecture, quality of code, quality of test plan, quality of testing, quality of documentation, quality of reviews, quality of project management etc.