Lo 06

Editor's Notes

• #4: What is Software Engineering? The goal is to produce high quality software to satisfy a set of functional and nonfunctional requirements. How do we do that? First, and foremost, by acknowledging that it is a problem solving activity. That is, it has to rely on well known techniques that are used all over the world for solving problems. There are two major parts of any problem solving process: Analysis: Understand the nature of the problem. This is done by looking at the problem and trying to see if there are subaspects that can be solved independently from each other. This means, that we need to identify the pieces of the puzzle (In object-oriented development, we will call this object identification). Synthesis: Once you have identified the pieces, you want to put them back together into a larger structure, usually by keeping some type of structure within the structure. Techniques, Methodologies and Tools: To aid you in the analysis and synthesis you are using 3 types of weapons: Techniques are well known procedures that you know will produce a result (Algorithms, cook book recipes are examples of techniques). Some people use the word “method” instead of technique, but this word is already reserved in our object-oriented development language, so we won’t use it here. A collection of techniques is called a methodology. (A cookbook is a methodology). A Tool is an instrument that helps you to accomplish a method. Examples of tools are: Pans, pots and stove. Note that these weapons are not enough to make a really good sauce. That is only possible if you are a good cook. In our case, if you are a good software engineer. Techniques, methodologies and tools are the domain of discourse for computer scientists as well. What is the difference?