Page 181 - DCAP405_SOFTWARE_ENGINEERING

Software Engineering

Notes
Inmon associates: Mr Inmon has created three companies. His first, Prism Solutions, has
become part of IBM in 1995 and Pinecomb Systems was sold in 2000.
“I have become old to manage companies. At Inmon Associates Inc based in Colorado, the
focus is on data warehouse technologies and addressing its challenges,” he said.
10.4 Summary

 Software architecture has started to receive focus since the last decade.
 It is becoming clearer that an early and careful architecture design can greatly reduce the
failure rates of software projects.
 A good architecture design partitions the functional requirements of a software system
into a manageable set of interacting components.

 Data such as event lists and images need to be kept in files as they are received.
 They also need to be correlated with engineering and other ancillary data which arrive as
a continuous time stream and to be associated with a calibration test or an observation ID.

 Once the context is modeled and all external interfaces are explained, the structure of the
system is specified by the designer.

10.5 Keywords

Archetypes: Archetypes are the abstract building blocks of an architectural design.

Data warehouse: A data warehouse is a large, independent database that serves the set of
applications required by a business.
Data design: Data design translates data objects defined during analysis model into data structures
at the software component level and, when necessary, a database architecture at the application
level.

10.6 Review Questions

1. As the size of software systems increases, the algorithms and data structures of the
computation no longer constitute the major design problems. Explain.
2. Data such as event lists and images need to be kept in files as they are received. Discuss.

3. Data design translates data objects defined during analysis model into data structures.
Describe.
4. The proposal table contains a record for each proposal which points to the associated file
in the file table. Explain how?
5. The content of each data object should be defined through a mechanism that should be
established. Analyze.
6. Analyze how architectural design begins; the design should define the external entities
that the software interacts with and nature of the interaction.

7. Architectural context represents how the software interacts with entities external to its
boundaries. Discuss with an example.
8. Archetypes can be derived by examining analysis classes defined as part of analysis model.
Describe.

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