CS504 Midterm Solved Subjective Paper

Software engineering (CS504)

What is software engineering?

Software engineering is the process of analyzing user needs and designing, constructing, and testing end user applications that will satisfy these needs through the use of software programming languages. It is the application of engineering principles to software development.

2ND DEFINITION

Software engineering is not just concerned with the technical processes of software development but also with activities such as software project management and with the development of tools, methods and theories to support software production”.

Why is software engineering important?

Software engineering is important because specific software is needed in almost every industry, in every business, and for every function. It becomes more important as time goes on – if something breaks within your application portfolio, a quick, efficient, and effective fix needs to happen as soon as possible. Why Study Software Engineering? ... Software Engineering applies the knowledge and theoretical understanding gained through computer science to building high-quality software products. As a maturing discipline, software is becoming more and more important in our everyday lives.

What do software engineers do?

A software engineer applies mathematical analysis and the principles of computer science in order to design and develop computer software. ... When working with a client, a software engineer will typically analyze the client's needs, then design, test, and develop the computer software in order to meet those needs.

Why is software so important?

The operating system controls the basic functions of a computer or network. It's a software program that enables hardware to communicate and operate with the computer software. Microsoft (MSFT) is a leading player in this segment with 90% of personal computers using Windows as their operating system.

WHAT IS SOFTWEAR CRISIS?

Software crisis is a term used in the early days of computing science for the difficulty of writing useful and efficient computer programs in the required time. The software crisis was due to the rapid increases in computer power and the complexity of the problems that could not be tackled. With the increase in the complexity of the software, many software problems arose because existing methods were insufficient. The term "software crisis" was coined by some attendees at the first NATO Software Engineering Conference in 1968 at Garmisch, Germany.[1][2] Edsger Dijkstra's 1972 ACM Turing Award Lecture makes reference to this same problem:[3] The major cause of the software crisis is that the machines have become several orders of magnitude more powerful! To put it quite bluntly: as long as there were no machines, programming was no problem at all; when we had a few weak computers, programming became a mild problem, and now we have gigantic computers, programming has become an equally gigantic problem.

According to handout?

In early 60s software had suffered from the similar kind of problem to which we call Software Crisis. Techniques that were used to develop small software were not applicable for large software systems. This thing resulted in the following consequences. ➢ In most of the cases that software which was tried to be build using those old tools ➢ and techniques were not complete. o Most of the times it was delivered too late. o Most of the projects were over-budgeted. o And in most of the case systems build using these techniques were not reliable – meaning that they were not be able to do what they were expected to do. As a result of these problems a conference were held in 1960 in which the term software crisis was introduced. And the term of Software Engineering was also coined in the same conference.

In the late 1960s, it became clear that the development of software is different from manufacturing other products. This is because employing more manpower (programmers) later in the software development does not always help speed up the development process. Instead, sometimes it may have negative impacts like delay in achieving the scheduled targets, degradation of software quality, etc. Though software has been an