The Traditional Software Development Process

This is the way software is traditionally developed.

This relates to the programming you've been doing in class:

• Your teacher gives you problems to understand and solve; these are the requirements. In industry, engineers take the general statement of need and translate it into more specific requirements.
• You figure out what procedures you need and in what order they are going to be callsed; this is the design.
• You write the code and the documentation.
• You make sure your program solves the problem your teacher gave you; this is testing.
• You turn your homework in; this is delivering the software.

In industry, software is usually developed by teams of engineers. That is, different parts of the entire software system are developed by different teams. During the design phase, the engineers managing the development need to carefully plan how the system is parceled into these different parts (these parts include software and documentation). These engineers then need to make sure

1. all of the parts developed by the different teams fit together
2. the entire system is tested, and
3. the system is delivered to the customer and supported during use.

How has this process been working in industry?

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