Software Development Life Cycle – MODIFIED WATERFALL

Many engineers recommend modified versions of the waterfall model. In the traditional waterfall model, the different stages of development are not allowed to overlap. One common type of modification allows some of the stages to overlap, which results in reduced documentation requirements and a reduced cost of returning to earlier stages to make changes. Another common modification is to incorporate prototyping into the requirements phases.

Overlapping stages, such as the requirements stage and the design stage, allow the development team to integrate feedback from the design phase into the requirements; but overlapping stages can make it difficult to know when you are finished with a given stage, as the line between stages becomes blurred. This makes progress harder track. Without distinct stages, problems can cause you to defer important decisions until later in the process when they are more expensive to correct.

Software Development Life Cycle – PROTOTYPING

One of the main problems with the waterfall model is that the requirements often are not completely understood in the early development stages. When you reach the future stages, you may discover that you need to adjust the requirements.

Prototyping can be useful in determining how a design meets a set of requirements. You can build a prototype, adjust the requirements, and revise the prototype several times, gaining an understanding of the project’s overall goals. In addition to clarifying the requirements, a prototype also defines many areas of the design at the same time.

The pure waterfall model allows for prototyping in later stages, but not in the early requirements stages.

Some drawbacks of prototyping:

Software Development Life Cycle – SPIRAL

The spiral model is an iterative model that attempts to combine advantages of the top-down and bottom-up models of software design. The goal is to reduce, as much as possible, an application’s time-to-market; in the traditional waterfall model, since each step must be completed before the next one starts, the time-to-market can be much longer.

The system requirements are defined in as much detail as possible. This usually involves interviewing a number of users representing all the external or internal users and other aspects of the existing system.

Software Development Life

Kovair's Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) provides a complete and total support for all SDLC activities and helps overcome the complexities in the total development process from initiation, analysis, design, implementation and maintenance to disposal. It also provides a structured and standardized process for all phases of any software development effort, thereby ensuring that all functional user requirements, and strategic goals and objectives are met.

Software national

With a national unemployment rate of 9.6 percent, many people assume employers have their pick of applicants for any job, McCombs said. Not so. Within every down job market exist bright spots, which in Chicago means tech jobs, particularly for software engineers.

The continued growth of the Internet and mobile technology is fueling the increased demand for IT professionals, McCombs said. Computer application software engineers will be the fastest growing job category over the next eight years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which projects a 32 percent increase in the number of computer software engineers between 2008 and 2018. The total work force is expected to grow 8 percent during the same period.

Software engineers hard to find

If you're looking for a career on the cutting edge, think about becoming a software engineer.

Skilled software engineers and Web developers are in such short supply in the Chicago area that Adam McCombs, chief executive of technology firm JumpForward, says finding qualified job candidates is "the bane of my existence."

Software Engineering: Art or Engineering.

The argument for treating software engineering as an art form is similar. Writing software could be considered art but only in the hands of truly brilliant software developers  and only when those truly brilliant software developers are in the zone, building something amazing. Everyone else is just writing code. Much like how no one would consider multiplication tables artistic, anyone who considers churning out code without intention or understanding of what is written as art is kidding themselves. Looking at software engineering from the perspective of eurhythmics lets us state this more as a fact than an opinion