Maintenance

If everything went to plan today (without me) then you should have learned about the three different types of maintenance that can occur after a program has been released.

These are:

Perfective – adding new features to improve the software (e.g. Sims updates!)

Corrective – fixing problems in the software that should have been taken care of during development!

Adaptive – altering the software to work on new computer systems or in new environments

All of these occur after the software has been released.

Powerpoint from lesson:

Documentation and Evaluation

I handed out a load of games today! I was trying to make a point about the different documents that should come with finished software. The two you need to remember are:

User guide - explains how the software should be used

Technical guide – details system requirements, how to install the software etc.

We also looked at Evaluation.  An evaluation report must detail if the software is fit for purpose.

Here are the arrangements for the software development process part of the course:

Testing

There are 3 kinds of test data that you need to know about. You should also be able to give examples of data for a piece of code shown:

Normal – data within the expected range for a program (e.g. 45 for a program expecting a mark between 1 and 100)

Boundary - data on the edge of the expected range (e.g. 1 or 100)

Out of Range – data not expected by the program (e.g. “fifteen”, -1)

Apart from that we discussed the terms comprehensive and systematic. See powerpoint for details.

Implementation – Procedural, Event Driven and Declarative Languages

We wrote down notes from a powerpoint today that explained the difference between procedural languages, event driven and declarative.

For the exam: you need to be able to give an example language for each of these categories (COMAL for procedural, Visual Basic for Event driven, Prolog for declarative).

In the screen shot below it shows the declarative language example. I wrote some facts and rules in (about people with blond hair and cleverness levels) for example purposes only. Not being hairist.

We also did an image quiz (see below)covering most of the features of good software:

• Robust
• Readable
• Reliable
• Correct
• Easily Maintained
• Portable
• Efficient