Software Engineering Part I & SEI (Extended)

An Introduction to Project Management & Requirements Engineering

Exercise 1
Please submit using the CANVAS system by 11 am Tuesday 21 October 2014 (as pdf).
Please include your student identification number. Do not include your name.
Exercises (5 out of 6 count) represent 20% of the total mark for module SEI.
Note that there are no extensions to the deadline date without welfare agreement.
No penalities will be applied to late submission with welfare agreement.
Note that unauthorised late submission will be penalized 5% of the mark per day or
part of day (excludes weekends and holidays). Exercises will not be accepted once
marks have been published.
Q1 Consider the following information about a software development process.
TSS Ltd developed one of the first digital switches and sold many telephone-switching
systems around the world. Telephone-switching systems establish and maintain connections
among telephone lines. Telephone-switching systems are among the most complex
embedded, real-time software systems. The software has very stringent performance,
reliability and fault-tolerance requirements. There is a legal requirement to support
enhancement over a period of at least 20 years. The popularity of TSS systems had caused a
demand for more features and TSS needed to develop a major software release to satisfy these
demands. The main requirement of the new release was that the system must double the
number of calls it could process to 20,000 calls per hour.
The TSS software development department was structured into 5 groups each responsible for
a separate sub-system of the TSS system. In addition, an integration and testing team
performed system testing and released software to customers. Three software engineers who
had been involved in the original development of the system conducted a feasibility study to
assess the proposed changes. They used a scripting language to develop some software to
assess the technical feasibility of the proposed changes. On the basis of their experiments a
statement of requirements and outline design were prepared. The new release involved some
hardware changes and changes to all 5 sub-systems. The requirements for each sub-system
were given to each group. When each group had completed all the necessary changes, the
integration and testing team performed extensive functionality, performance and reliability
tests. Some minor defects were found relating to the interfaces between sub-systems. After
several months the system was released and was successful.
(a) What type of life-cycle is being employed here, that is, waterfall, incremental
(planned), incremental (agile) or a hybrid? Is the life-cycle used with prototyping,
reuse or concurrent engineering? Explain your choices.
[7 marks]
(b) What are the advantages of this approach? Are there any disadvantages? Is this the
best life-cycle to use? Justify your choice.
[8 marks]
Q2 Identify 3 reasons why it is difficult to adopt agile methods in large software
development projects.
Identify 1 way in which the SCRUM approach to agile development might help to
overcome some of the difficulties of using agile methods in large software
development projects.
Hint: Read section 3.4 and 3.5 Sommerville 9
th
edition
[5 marks]
.