Df answer - Discussion Forum Unit 2 PDF

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Discussion Forum Unit 2...

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Discuss at least two reasons as to why the classical waterfall model can be considered impractical and cannot be used in real projects

The waterfall model is considered to be a plan-driven process model. This means that you must first plan your activities and then start working on them. This results in a series of phases in a linear fashion (Requirements – Design – Implementation – Testing – Maintenance). The idea is that each phase only starts when the previous phase has completed and each phase takes as input the output of its previous one. This model cannot be strictly followed in real projects and therefore it’s impractical. In real life these phases often overlap and many times engineers go from one phase to a previous one and then forward again until they reach a satisfactory result. There are a lot of reasons. I will give two using examples: Reason 1: It is humanly impossible to complete a whole project without committing a single mistake. Mistakes in software development result in defects which are usually detected much later than the phase they were introduced. For example a program may lack a necessary function and this may be discovered in the testing phase. Software engineers should go back to the design phase and alter things to make it work and go all the way through the intermediate phases again. Reason 2: As the project evolves from phase to phase new requirements or issues may arise. For example in the implementation phase, the engineers may realize that the requirement or the design is not complete enough to allow them to produce the best coding solution for the project, because maybe certain desired functionality cannot be achieved with the proposed design thus far. Therefore they should go back and redo the requirement phase or redesign the whole project.

References Software Engineering - Computer Science and Engineering. (n.d.). Retrieved November 23, 2013, from Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur: http://nptel.iitm.ac.in/courses/Webcourse-contents/IIT%20Kharagpur/Soft %20Engg/pdf/m02L04.pdf Sommerville, I. (2011). Software Engineering. Pearson. Retrieved November 23, 2013, from http://cs305.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/software_engineering_9th_edition.p df...