Week 8 [Mon, Mar 6th] - SE Topics

Writing an OOP program is essentially writing instructions that the computer will use to,

1. create the virtual world of the object network, and
2. provide it the inputs to produce the outcome you want.

A class contains instructions for creating a specific kind of objects. It turns out sometimes multiple objects keep the same type of data and have the same behavior because they are of the same kind. Instructions for creating a 'kind' (or ‘class’) of objects can be done once and those same instructions can be used to objects of that kind. You call such instructions a Class.

Reuse is a major theme in software engineering practices. By reusing tried-and-tested components, the robustness of a new software system can be enhanced while reducing the manpower and time requirement. Reusable components come in many forms; it can be reusing a piece of code, a subsystem, or a whole software.

While you may be tempted to use many libraries/frameworks/platforms that seem to crop up on a regular basis and promise to bring great benefits, note that there are costs associated with reuse. Here are some:

• The reused code may be an overkill (think using a sledgehammer to crack a nut), increasing the size of, and/or degrading the performance of, your software.
• The reused software may not be mature/stable enough to be used in an important product. That means the software can change drastically and rapidly, possibly in ways that break your software.
• Non-mature software has the risk of dying off as fast as they emerged, leaving you with a dependency that is no longer maintained.
• The license of the reused software (or its dependencies) restrict how you can use/develop your software.
• The reused software might have bugs, missing features, or security vulnerabilities that are important to your product, but not so important to the maintainers of that software, which means those flaws will not get fixed as fast as you need them to.
• Malicious code can sneak into your product via compromised dependencies.

An Application Programming Interface (API) specifies the interface through which other programs can interact with a software component. It is a contract between the component and its clients.

When developing large systems, if you define the API of each component early, the development team can develop the components in parallel because the future behavior of the other components are now more predictable.

A library is a collection of modular code that is general and can be used by other programs.

These are the typical steps required to use a library:

1. Read the documentation to confirm that its functionality fits your needs.
2. Check the license to confirm that it allows reuse in the way you plan to reuse it. For example, some libraries might allow non-commercial use only.
3. Download the library and make it accessible to your project. Alternatively, you can configure your to do it for you.
4. Call the library API from your code where you need to use the library's functionality.

The overall structure and execution flow of a specific category of software systems can be very similar. The similarity is an opportunity to reuse at a high scale.

A software framework is a reusable implementation of a software (or part thereof) providing generic functionality that can be selectively customized to produce a specific application.

Some frameworks provide a complete implementation of a default behavior which makes them immediately usable.

A framework facilitates the adaptation and customization of some desired functionality.

Some frameworks cover only a specific component or an aspect.

Although both frameworks and libraries are reuse mechanisms, there are notable differences:

• Libraries are meant to be used ‘as is’ while frameworks are meant to be customized/extended. e.g., writing plugins for Eclipse so that it can be used as an IDE for different languages (C++, PHP, etc.), adding modules and themes to Drupal, and adding test cases to JUnit.

• Your code calls the library code while the framework code calls your code. Frameworks use a technique called inversion of control, aka the “Hollywood principle” (i.e. don’t call us, we’ll call you!). That is, you write code that will be called by the framework, e.g. writing test methods that will be called by the JUnit framework. In the case of libraries, your code calls libraries.

A platform provides a runtime environment for applications. A platform is often bundled with various libraries, tools, frameworks, and technologies in addition to a runtime environment but the defining characteristic of a software platform is the presence of a runtime environment.

Cloud computing is the delivery of computing as a service over the network, rather than a product running on a local machine. This means the actual hardware and software is located at a remote location, typically, at a large server farm, while users access them over the network. Maintenance of the hardware and software is managed by the cloud provider while users typically pay for only the amount of services they use. This model is similar to the consumption of electricity; the power company manages the power plant, while the consumers pay them only for the electricity used. The cloud computing model optimizes hardware and software utilization and reduces the cost to consumers. Furthermore, users can scale up/down their utilization at will without having to upgrade their hardware and software. The traditional non-cloud model of computing is similar to everyone buying their own generators to create electricity for their own use.

_{source: https://commons.wikimedia.org}

Cloud computing can deliver computing services at three levels:

1. Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) delivers computer infrastructure as a service. For example, a user can deploy virtual servers on the cloud instead of buying physical hardware and installing server software on them. Another example would be a customer using storage space on the cloud for off-site storage of data. Rackspace is an example of an IaaS cloud provider. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is another one.

2. Platform as a service (PaaS) provides a platform on which developers can build applications. Developers do not have to worry about infrastructure issues such as deploying servers or load balancing as is required when using IaaS. Those aspects are automatically taken care of by the platform. The price to pay is reduced flexibility; applications written on PaaS are limited to facilities provided by the platform. A PaaS example is the Google App Engine where developers can build applications using Java, Python, PHP, or Go whereas Amazon EC2 allows users to deploy applications written in any language on their virtual servers.

3. Software as a service (SaaS) allows applications to be accessed over the network instead of installing them on a local machine. For example, Google Docs is a SaaS word processing software, while Microsoft Word is a traditional word processing software.

Software development goes through different stages such as requirements, analysis, design, implementation and testing. These stages are collectively known as the software development life cycle (SDLC). There are several approaches, known as software development life cycle models (also called software process models), that describe different ways to go through the SDLC. Each process model prescribes a "roadmap" for the software developers to manage the development effort. The roadmap describes the aims of the development stage(s), the artifacts or outcome of each stage, as well as the workflow i.e. the relationship between stages.

The sequential model, also called the waterfall model, models software development as a linear process, in which the project is seen as progressing steadily in one direction through the development stages. The name waterfall stems from how the model is drawn to look like a waterfall (see below).

When one stage of the process is completed, it should produce some artifacts to be used in the next stage. For example, upon completion of the requirements stage, a comprehensive list of requirements is produced that will see no further modifications. A strict application of the sequential model would require each stage to be completed before starting the next.

This could be a useful model when the problem statement is well-understood and stable. In such cases, using the sequential model should result in a timely and systematic development effort, provided that all goes well. As each stage has a well-defined outcome, the progress of the project can be tracked with relative ease.

The major problem with this model is that the requirements of a real-world project are rarely well-understood at the beginning and keep changing over time. One reason for this is that users are generally not aware of how a software application can be used without prior experience in using a similar application.

The iterative model (sometimes called iterative and incremental) advocates having several iterations of SDLC. Each of the iterations could potentially go through all the development stages, from requirements gathering to testing & deployment. Roughly, it appears to be similar to several cycles of the sequential model.

In this model, each of the iterations produces a new version of the product. Feedback on the new version can then be fed to the next iteration. Taking the Minesweeper game as an example, the iterative model will deliver a fully playable version from the early iterations. However, the first iteration will have primitive functionality, for example, a clumsy text based UI, fixed board size, limited randomization, etc. These functionalities will then be improved in later releases.

The iterative model can take a breadth-first or a depth-first approach to iteration planning.

• breadth-first: an iteration evolves all major components in parallel e.g., add a new feature fully, or enhance an existing feature.
• depth-first: an iteration focuses on fleshing out only some components e.g., update the backend to support a new feature that will be added in a future iteration.

Most projects use a mixture of breadth-first and depth-first iterations i.e., an iteration can contain some breadth-first work as well as some depth-first work.

In 2001, a group of prominent software engineering practitioners met and brainstormed for an alternative to documentation-driven, heavyweight software development processes that were used in most large projects at the time. This resulted in something called the agile manifesto (a vision statement of what they were looking to do).

You are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it.

Through this work you have come to value:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, you value the items on the left more.
_{-- Extract from the Agile Manifesto}

Subsequently, some of the signatories of the manifesto went on to create process models that try to follow it. These processes are collectively called agile processes. Some of the key features of agile approaches are:

• Requirements are prioritized based on the needs of the user, are clarified regularly (at times almost on a daily basis) with the entire project team, and are factored into the development schedule as appropriate.
• Instead of doing a very elaborate and detailed design and a project plan for the whole project, the team works based on a rough project plan and a high level design that evolves as the project goes on.
• There is a strong emphasis on complete transparency and responsibility sharing among the team members. The team is responsible together for the delivery of the product. Team members are accountable, and regularly and openly share progress with each other and with the user.

There are a number of agile processes in the development world today. eXtreme Programming (XP) and Scrum are two of the well-known ones.

This description of Scrum was adapted from Wikipedia [retrieved on 18/10/2011], emphasis added:

Scrum is a process skeleton that contains sets of practices and predefined roles. The main roles in Scrum are:

• The Scrum Master, who maintains the processes (typically in lieu of a project manager)
• The Product Owner, who represents the stakeholders and the business
• The Team, a cross-functional group who do the actual analysis, design, implementation, testing, etc.

A Scrum project is divided into iterations called Sprints. A sprint is the basic unit of development in Scrum. Sprints tend to last between one week and one month, and are a timeboxed (i.e. restricted to a specific duration) effort of a constant length.

Each sprint is preceded by a planning meeting, where the tasks for the sprint are identified and an estimated commitment for the sprint goal is made, and followed by a review or retrospective meeting, where the progress is reviewed and lessons for the next sprint are identified.

During each sprint, the team creates a potentially deliverable product increment (for example, working and tested software). The set of features that go into a sprint come from the product backlog, which is a prioritized set of high level requirements of work to be done. Which backlog items go into the sprint is determined during the sprint planning meeting. During this meeting, the Product Owner informs the team of the items in the product backlog that he or she wants completed. The team then determines how much of this they can commit to complete during the next sprint, and records this in the sprint backlog. During a sprint, no one is allowed to change the sprint backlog, which means that the requirements are frozen for that sprint. Development is timeboxed such that the sprint must end on time; if requirements are not completed for any reason they are left out and returned to the product backlog. After a sprint is completed, the team demonstrates the use of the software.

Scrum enables the creation of self-organizing teams by encouraging co-location of all team members, and verbal communication between all team members and disciplines in the project.

A key principle of Scrum is its recognition that during a project the customers can change their minds about what they want and need (often called requirements churn), and that unpredicted challenges cannot be easily addressed in a traditional predictive or planned manner. As such, Scrum adopts an empirical approach—accepting that the problem cannot be fully understood or defined, focusing instead on maximizing the team’s ability to deliver quickly and respond to emerging requirements.

Daily Scrum is another key scrum practice. The description below was adapted from https://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com (emphasis added):

The following description was adapted from the XP home page, emphasis added:

Extreme Programming (XP) stresses customer satisfaction. Instead of delivering everything you could possibly want on some date far in the future, this process delivers the software you need as you need it.

XP aims to empower developers to confidently respond to changing customer requirements, even late in the life cycle.

XP emphasizes teamwork. Managers, customers, and developers are all equal partners in a collaborative team. XP implements a simple, yet effective environment enabling teams to become highly productive. The team self-organizes around the problem to solve it as efficiently as possible.

XP aims to improve a software project in five essential ways: communication, simplicity, feedback, respect, and courage. Extreme Programmers constantly communicate with their customers and fellow programmers. They keep their design simple and clean. They get feedback by testing their software starting on day one. Every small success deepens their respect for the unique contributions of each and every team member. With this foundation, Extreme Programmers are able to courageously respond to changing requirements and technology.

XP has a set of simple rules. XP is a lot like a jig saw puzzle with many small pieces. Individually the pieces make no sense, but when combined together a complete picture can be seen. This flow chart shows how Extreme Programming's rules work together.

Pair programming, CRC cards, project velocity, and standup meetings are some interesting topics related to XP. Refer to extremeprogramming.org to find out more about XP.

This section has some exercises that cover multiple topics related to SDLC process models.