Software Development Process

The software development life cycle is a multistage process that includes requirements specification, analysis, design, implementation, testing, deployment, and maintenance. Developing a software product is an engineering process. Software products, no matter how large or how small, have the same life cycle: requirements specification, analysis, design, implementation, testing, deployment, and maintenance.

Requirements specification is a formal process that seeks to understand the problem that the software will address and to document in detail what the software system needs to do. This phase involves close interaction between users and developers. Most of the examples in this book are simple, and their requirements are clearly stated. In the real world, however, problems are not always well defined. Developers need to work closely with their customers (the individuals or organizations that will use the software) and study the problem carefully to identify what the software needs to do.

System analysis seeks to analyze the data flow and to identify the system’s input and output. When you do analysis, it helps to identify what the output is first, and then figure out what input data you need in order to produce the output.

System design is to design a process for obtaining the output from the input. This phase involves the use of many levels of abstraction to break down the problem into manageable components and design strategies for implementing each component. You can view each component as a subsystem that performs a specific function of the system. The essence of system analysis and design is input, process, and output (IPO).

Implementation involves translating the system design into programs. Separate programs are written for each component and then integrated to work together. This phase requires the use of a programming language such as Java. The implementation involves coding, selftesting, and debugging (that is, finding errors, called bugs, in the code).

Testing ensures that the code meets the requirements specification and weeds out bugs. An independent team of software engineers not involved in the design and implementation of the product usually conducts such testing.

Deployment makes the software available for use. Depending on the type of software, it may be installed on each user’s machine or installed on a server accessible on the Internet.

Maintenance is concerned with updating and improving the product. A software product must continue to perform and improve in an ever-evolving environment. This requires periodic upgrades of the product to fix newly discovered bugs and incorporate changes.

To see the software development process in action, we will now create a program that computes loan payments. The loan can be a car loan, a student loan, or a home mortgage loan. For an introductory programming course, we focus on requirements specification, analysis, design, implementation, and testing.

Stage 1: Requirements Specification

The program must satisfy the following requirements:

• It must let the user enter the interest rate, the loan amount, and the number of years for which payments will be made.
• It must compute and display the monthly payment and total payment amounts.

Stage 2: System Analysis

The output is the monthly payment and total payment, which can be obtained using the following formulas:
monthlyPayment = (loanAmount * monthlyInterestRate) / 1 - 1 /
(1 + monthlyInterestRate) ^ numberOfYears * 12

totalPayment = monthlyPayment * numberOfYears * 12

So, the input needed for the program is the monthly interest rate, the length of the loan in years, and the loan amount.

The requirements specification says that the user must enter the annual interest rate, the loan amount, and the number of years for which payments will be made. During analysis, however, it is possible that you may discover that input is not sufficient or that some values are unnecessary for the output. If this happens, you can go back and modify the requirements specification.

In the real world, you will work with customers from all walks of life. You may develop software for chemists, physicists, engineers, economists, and psychologists, and of course you will not have (or need) complete knowledge of all these fields. Therefore, you don’t have to know how formulas are derived, but given the monthly interest rate, the number of years, and the loan amount, you can compute the monthly payment in this program. You will, however, need to communicate with customers and understand how a mathematical model works for the system.

Stage 3: System Design

During system design, you identify the steps in the program.

Step 1. Prompt the user to enter the annual interest rate, the number of years, and the loan amount. (The interest rate is commonly expressed as a percentage of the principal for a period of one year. This is known as the annual interest rate.)
Step 2. The input for the annual interest rate is a number in percent format, such as 4.5%. The program needs to convert it into a decimal by dividing it by 100. To obtain the monthly interest rate from the annual interest rate, divide it by 12, since a year has 12 months. So, to obtain the monthly interest rate in decimal format, you need to divide the annual interest rate in percentage by 1200. For example, if the annual interest rate is 4.5%, then the monthly interest rate is 4.5/1200 = 0.00375.
Step 3. Compute the monthly payment using the preceding formula.
Step 4. Compute the total payment, which is the monthly payment multiplied by 12 and multiplied by the number of years.
Step 5. Display the monthly payment and total payment.

Stage 4: Implementation

Implementation is also known as coding (writing the code). In the formula, you have to compute (1 + monthlyInterestRate) ^ numberOfYears * 12, which can be obtained using Math.pow(1 + monthlyInterestRate, numberOfYears * 12).

Stage 5: Testing

After the program is implemented, test it with some sample input data and verify whether the output is correct. The system design phase in this example identified several steps. It is a good approach to code and test these steps incrementally by adding them one at a time. This approach makes it much easier to pinpoint problems and debug the program.

Case Study: Counting Monetary Units

This section presents a program that breaks a large amount of money into smaller units.

Suppose you want to develop a program that changes a given amount of money into smaller monetary units. The program lets the user enter an amount as a double value representing a total in dollars and cents, and outputs a report listing the monetary equivalent in the maximum number of dollars, quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies, in this order, to result in the minimum number of coins.
Here are the steps in developing the program:

1. Prompt the user to enter the amount as a decimal number, such as 11.56.
2. Convert the amount (e.g., 11.56) into cents (1156).
3. Divide the cents by 100 to find the number of dollars. Obtain the remaining cents using the cents remainder 100.
4. Divide the remaining cents by 25 to find the number of quarters. Obtain the remaining cents using the remaining cents remainder 25.
5. Divide the remaining cents by 10 to find the number of dimes. Obtain the remaining cents using the remaining cents remainder 10.
6. Divide the remaining cents by 5 to find the number of nickels. Obtain the remaining cents using the remaining cents remainder 5.
7. The remaining cents are the pennies.
8. Display the result.