Software Engineering Case Study

Software engineering has been around since the 1960’s by its fairly new nature in respect to other engineering fields it is quite difficult to find what area within history this profession lies. The term programming was first coined which referred to the tasking of a coding a computer to run various tasks. During a NATO sponsored conference held in 1968, the term software engineer began to emerge. Software engineer refers to a highly disciplined and systematic approach to software development and maintenance. This was the start of the revolution in the field of programming. During this time, there were many issues involved with the process of software development. This conference was designed to address many issues that which plagued software

In Michiel van Genuchten’s case study “Why is Software Late? An Empirical Study of Reasons For Delav in Software Development” he explores the reasons why this might be the case. The study took place in a software development department that ran for approximately two years. The department was concerned with the “development and integration of the system software in the operating system and data communicating fields”. One hundred and seventy-five engineers were in control of roughly three hundred products. It is pointed out that the time spent on each activity was difficult to measure. As a result, there was a lack of responsibility and documentation of recorded hours. The difference between the data held by the project leaders was too large to be credible. The most significant finding of this case study is that only thirty percent of activities were finished according to plan. It was discovered that there was an ever-growing difference between subsequent phases of the project. It is pointed out that forty five percent of the cause for these overages was due to organizational related issues. To conclude the study various surveys were distributed to try and figure out why the estimation of phases were off by such a high amount. It turns out that many described an over optimistic plan and an underestimation of complexity and

One of them being the Unified Modeling Language also known as UML. In the article "The impact of UML documentation on software maintenance: An experimental evaluation." it describes that often most software maintenance is performed usually by people who were not involved with the original design. It goes on to say that “…designs often has been advocated as a necessity to help software engineers remain in intellectual control while changing complex systems.” Compounded by the fact that documentation eats up a lot of time and money. This has led to a tremendous problem. This is where UML comes into play, this is an evolving standard that companies are beginning to adopt to help stop this issue. UML gives a way to visualize a software’s architectural patterns in various diagrams. Some examples of this include components of a system and how they interact with other components, how the system will run, and how entities will interact with others. All of these diagrams work together to aid in the process of writing the actual code and the maintenance of the code in the future. It also serves as well written documentation that is easy to read. To sum up the article UML provides a cost-effective way of creating documentation because of that it also aids in the design