Process Engineering for Software Development

SPECIFY4IT™ - an alternative to the traditional software development process.

“Re-engineering the software development process – for what purpose? There are no end of good development methods and tools out there to do the job. Who needs another?"

Good questions, however SPECIFY4IT™ is not a standard software development toolkit. It has re-engineered the development cycle. Software is usually developed from a specification. The development tools used may be sophisticated integrated development environments (IDE) or they may be a simple language compiler. The IDE has reached a level of sophistication that provides a host of support tools, such as debugging and tracing tools. Using these tools, the developer can build and debug efficiently. The IDE incorporates a compiler, which checks the source code for syntactic errors and then generates object code to run on the target machine.

"This is all standard. Any new IT graduate would recognise this situation and, given the correct language, be productive within hours."

However, there are a few problems. Inevitably the developer incorporates bugs into the source code. Some are detectable by the compiler and some are not. Bugs undetected by the compiler will remain in the code until detected either by testing or during the live running of the system. No one knows the effect of each bug in advance, so the only way of detection is by noting a fault in the running system. However, as a system never exactly matches the original business requirement, a seeming malfunction may be caused by a bug or it may be the result of a requirement not delivered or differently interpreted. All post-coding work costs time, money and may cost the business itself dearly depending on the exact effect of the bug.

"This is recognised and accepted, because there is seemingly no other route to software development. Much time and money is spent testing software systems in an attempt to find all the bugs. Accepted wisdom states that no one can prove that a system has no more bugs. It's not possible."