Java™ Application Development on Linux - Dator

11.3 How to Develop Software265software costs, you pay it because the consequences of not doing it perfectly arefar too high.TIPOur discussion is not meant to be scholarship on the topic of software developmentmethodology; instead, it is meant to show simple, basic processes thatcan bring a reasonable amount of control to a software development project.These steps are, to name a few, requirements gathering, specification, objectanalysis, database design, development iteration (code, unit test, repeat),and so on.But most of us who write software do not deal with such consequences.Most of us are keeping track of purchases and payments. We’re recording productiondata. We’re tracking manifests and updating inventories. We are thegreat unwashed mass of MIS software developers. Here we, too, want to do itperfectly right. But every time we go to management and tell them how muchit will cost and how long it will take, the little “mass layoff” vein throbs in theirforeheads. We are always being told to do it faster and cheaper. And so we findourselves, again and again, tilting at the windmill of quality.So where does that leave us? When we go to management with the textbooksof software engineering, they either laugh or scowl. Clearly, the moneypeople are not prepared to support the cost of doing it right. So what do youdo? The best that you can. The one thing we can tell you for certain is that theformula for success is not “start writing code and trust to luck.”It is fair to say that even the minimal software development method shouldinclude the following steps:• Requirements gathering• Use case specification• Class discovery and problem domain decomposition• Technical requirements specification (architecturing)• Testing• Code and release management• Production and operations support• Bug and enhancement tracking