Software Development Methodology Recommendation Memo

Software Engineering

Describe software development life-cycle and need for associated processes: the life-cycle phases, engineering and management processes, and relationships between the phases and processes. Describe and compare alternative software process standards and presses (e.g. waterfall, incremental, spiral, prototyping, empirical and agile methods)

Douglas Troy

Memo

Less than a week

Writing, reading

Researching software development methods and processes

You will likely be involved in some aspect of software development or acquisition in your internships and your career after graduation. This assignment will engage you in thinking about the way that software development projects are organized and managed. In addition, you likely will be asked to look for alternative problem solving approaches, summarize those to your supervisor, and make a recommendation. This is also a part of this assignment.

For small programs such as those you have done in class you can probably conceptualize the entire solution in your mind and write your code without a lot of pre-planning. But for larger computer systems that you will encounter in an internship or in your career, the solution can’t be done by a single person. These systems require teams of people who maybe be separated by distance and time. To solve large problems, in a team environment, requires a structured or organized process. We call that organized process a software development methodology. These roadmaps are called Software Development Methodologies. This seems like a straight-forward process, but many computer-systems have failed due to flaws in the process.

This assignment introduces contrasting software development methodologies so that you are aware that there are choices to be made and for you to think about which process you believe would be most likely help you to successfully complete the class project on time while meeting the needs of our client.

Write a memo to your supervisor in which you compare the waterfall approach with the iterative approach, and recommend an approach to use in our class project.

N/A