26 August

1
26 August

• Concept
• Requirements

2
Software Engineering Overview

• What is engineering?
• Why is software engineering different than other
  engineering disciplines?
• Is software engineering different than
• computer science?
• programming?
• How similar or different are software engineering
  projects?

3
Engineering

• Turning ideas into reality
• Creating something useful
• from other things
• using science and math

4
Software Engineering vs. Other Engineering
Disciplines

• Maturity
• Roman aqueducts 2000 years ago
• Software engineering 50 years ago
• Startup costs
• Barriers to entry
• Rate of change

5
Different Types of Projects

• Consider 4 different types of systems
• COMP 523 projects
• Productivity suites
• Commercial web sites
• Airplane systems
• Pacemakers
• How do they differ in criticality?
• What does that mean for the development process?

6
Software Engineering Fundamental Steps

• Requirements
• Design
• Implementation
• Integration
• Test
• Deployment
• Maintenance

7
Our first task

• Spec for the project
• Need to understand
• Concept
• Users
• Use cases
• Requirements

8
Need to Start with a Concept

• How do you tell people about your project
• Why are you doing it
• What makes it unique or different
• the brochure

9
Capture Essence of Project

• Refer back if losing your way
• Remind yourself and others why
• Prominent
• First page of your web

10
Clients vs. Users

• The client is the person paying the bill
• The users are the ones that will
• Use your system
• Maintain your system
• Administer your system
• Know their
• Skill level
• Time constraints
• Tolerances
• Expectations

11
Requirements Analysis

• To build something, we first must understand what
  it is were building
• Establish expectations
• Understandable by both the client and the
  developer

12
Requirements
13
Why Written Requirements?

• Unambiguous
• Defines goals
• Cost of finding a requirements bug later can be
  100 times more expensive
• 99 weather satellite where used wrong units
  (metric vs. feet)

14
Our Requirements Phase

• What does the client want to do?
• User stories his (or her) terms
• Use cases your terms
• Extract the essence requirements
• Requirements document as a tool
• This product should
• Translate to a system functional spec

15
Talking to the client

• Active listening
• Restate what you hear
• How to extract information
• Ask them to tell stories
• Focus on the interface thats what the user sees
• Start the design process with the customer
• Draw pictures!