Page 120 - DCAP405_SOFTWARE_ENGINEERING

Unit 7: Software Engineering Practice

Analysis, planning, and design are important: Test objectives must be identified and Notes
understood. Tests must be planned and designed systematically. Without a road map, you
will get lost.
Motivation is important: You cannot be effective if you don’t care about the job. You must
want to find problems and enjoy trying to break the system.

Time and resources are important: You can’t be effective if you don’t have the time or
resources to do the job.

Timing of test preparation matters a lot: Early test preparation leads to an understanding
of project requirements and design. Early test preparation uncovers and prevents problems.
Early tests improve the effectiveness of subsequent reviews and inspections.

Measuring and tracking coverage is essential: You need to know what requirements,
design, and code have and have not been covered. Complex software is too difficult to
cover without systematic measurement.

Self Assessment

Fill in the blanks:
12. The main objective of testers is to design tests that uncover different classes of
……………………. with minimum amount of effort and time.

13. By contrast, higher level languages such as C, C++, Pascal, Cobol, Fortran, ADA and Java
are called “……………………. languages”.
14. ………………………. indicate how much to test and what to focus on.

15. Complex software is too difficult to cover without ……………………. measurement.

7.6 Summary

Separation of concerns is recognition of the need for human beings to work within a
limited context. The human mind is limited to dealing with approximately seven units of
data at a time.

When specifying the behavior of a data structure component, there are often two concerns
that need to be dealt with: basic functionality and support for data integrity.
A data structure component is often easier to use if these two concerns are divided as much
as possible into separate sets of client functions.
The planning activity encompasses a set of management and technical practices that enable
the software team to define a road maps it travels toward its strategic goal and tactical
objectives.
The objective of this topic is to provide a starting point for the use of model-based
verification techniques and a framework for their evaluation in real-world applications.
In software engineering practice, construction practice includes coding and testing tasks
and principles. Testing is a process of finding out an error.

A good testing technique is one which gives the maximum probability of finding out an
error.

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