Software Engineering in a quick and easy way.

Are you fascinated by Software Engineering? Do you wonder how software engineers build amazing software, website, and a variety of applications that are influencing our daily life? Consider this article as a crash course on Software Engineering, and learn its aspects of it in a quick and easy way.

What is Software Engineering?

Software is a product like Desktop Software, System Software, Hardware Drive, Websites, Web Applications, Mobile Apps, and many more. The software product is not only the software code but also its deployment in a form that is easily usable by the end user. So a software product is its executable, supporting files, like installer, installation manual, user manual, pre-configuration, configuration system, help files, and other supporting documents.

The process of producing software by an engineer or a team of engineers is called Software Engineering. This process involves multiple levels and steps, depending on the complexity and the size of the software. These steps include requirement gathering, resource planning, programming language or tech-stack selection, architecture designing, development plan, execution, documentation, Quality Analysis & testing, version control, deployment, and user acceptance.

Further, let us learn further about the various terminology used in the process of Software Engineering.

Qualities of a Software Engineering.

The quality of the software is subjective and varies on the parameters defined by the person who evaluates it. The generic parameters define the common functionalities, and other than that, we might have customized attributes to the software which is specific to that particular software and defined by the team who are requesting the software to be made. Whatever the parameters or attributes be, they serve the same purpose, which is to define the effectiveness, efficiency, usability, maintainability, and reliability of the software.

Effectiveness and Efficiency

The software will be termed as most effective or efficient when it performs as it is expected to do using the least possible resources. If a simple operation takes massive hard disk space, machine memory, or unnecessary CPU usage, then it will surely not be considered a good quality software product.

Usability

The most common reason to use software is to reduce manual work and increase productivity. If the software doesn’t meet these attributes, the product will be useless. Hence a lot of effort is put into the process of Software Engineering, to design the User Interface, flow of control, alert messages, and others.

Reliability

If it is working today, it should work tomorrow too. Hence in the process of Software Engineering, eye-to-details on the mitigation actions must be taken to address the sudden situations where things might go beyond human control. Situations like power failure, hard disk failure, and others. Plenty of verification, validations, security, and others must be placed so that unplanned situations can be professionally handled without crashing the software.

Maintainability

Markets keep on evolving and it surely reflects on the requirement of the software. A requirement of a hot feature of software may not be needed within 2 months of its release. So in the Software Engineering process, planning should be made, such that new features can be brought in and unused ones can be pulled out easily without breaking the core product.

Aspects of Software Engineering

The process of Software Engineering is a discipline, that addresses the following aspects of the software product and its production.

Commercial: The product must be cost-efficient, and beneficial to the producing company.

Design of Development: The architecture of the software must be meticulously designed using Design Principles like GRASP so that requirements are well-addressed, and the coding structure is well-defined and easily maintainable.

Deployment: The final product needs to be easily deliverable to the customers and end-users.

Other than the above-mentioned systematic approach, Software Engineering also involves the collection of past experience, and a record of known issues is also maintained. This helps to avoid the repetition of errors and mistakes that have occurred earlier.

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Photo credit: fauxels & Joakim Roubert.

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