Software engineering | software engineering components

 Software engineering

Software engineering is a discipline whose aim is the production of fault free software that satisfies the users needs and that is delivered on time and within budget.

A Software engineer is a person who applies the principles of software engineering to the design, development, maintenance, testing, and evaluation of Computer software

Software engineering is an engineering branch associated with development of Software product using well-defined scientific principles, methods and procedures. The outcome of software engineering is an efficient and reliable software product. It deals with cost effective solutions to practical problems by applying scientific knowledge. Software engineering is the application of methods and scientific knowledge to create practical cost-effective solutions for the design, construction, operation and maintenance of software.

software engineering

Objective of software engineering :

Software engineering is the systematic approach to the development, operation, maintenance and retirement of Software. The basic objective of software engineering is to develop methods and procedures for software development that can scale up for large systems and that can be used consistently to produce high-quality Software at low cost and with a small cycle of time.  The aim of software engineering are as follows;

·         To understand user conceptual models and development of better specification.

·         To improve design language and reusable code.

·         To satisfy the users requirements.

·         To achieve low maintenance and production cost.

·         To provide the Software within budget and time.

·         To achieve high performance.

 Need for Software Engineering :

1-      As Software development is expensive so proper measures are required so that the resources are used efficiently and effectively.

2-      Cost and time considerations are another factor, which arises the need for Software Engineering.

3-      Reliability factors

Components  of Software:

Software components are parts of a system or application. Components are a means of breaking the complexity of Software into manageable parts. Each component hides the complexity of its implementation behind an interface. Components can be swapped in and out like the interchangeable parts of a machine. This reduces the complexity of Software development, maintenance, operations and support and allows the same code to be reused in many places.

Set of programs:

A program is a subset of Software and it become Software only if documentation and operating procedure manuals are prepared.

It is a collection of source code and objects code.

Software documents :

Software documentation consist all the description, program, graphics and instruction pertaining to design, coding, testing and preparations of software .

A good Software contain following type of documentations :

1.      Analysis and specification

2.      Design 

3.      Coding

4.      Testing

Operating procedure :

Operating procedure provide information about what the Software is, how to work with it, how to install it on our system and how to control all the activities of the software.

The main aim of this manual is to provide help to operating staff for producing desired output with the help of that particular Software

It can be divided in two parts :

        I.            User manual

      II.            Operational manuals