TRADITIONAL SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT PROCESSES - Software Design for Six-Sigma: A Roadmap for Excellence - page 21

CHAPTER 2

TRADITIONAL SOFTWARE
DEVELOPMENT PROCESSES 1

2.1 INTRODUCTION

More and more companies are emphasizing formal software processes and requesting
diligent application. For the major organizations, businesses, government agencies,
and the military, the biggest constraints are cost, schedule, reliability, and quality
for a given software product. The Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute
(SEI) has carried out the refined work for Personal Software Process (PSP), Team
Software Process (TSP), Capability Mature Model (CMM), and Capability Maturity
Model Integration (CMMI). We will discuss software design techniques focusing on
real-time operating systems (RTOS) in the next chapter to complement, and in some
cases zoom in, on certain concepts that are introduced here.
A goal of this chapter is to present the various existing software processes and
their pros and cons, and then to classify them depending on the complexity and
size of the project. For example, Simplicity (or complexity) and size (Small size,
Medium size, or Large Size) attributes will be used to classify the existing software
developmental processes, which could be useful to a group, business, or organization.
This classification can be used to understand the pros and cons of the various software
processes at a glance and its suitability to a given software development project. A
few automotive software application examples will be presented to justify the needs
for including Six Sigma in the software process modeling techniques in Chapter 10.

1 In the literature, software development processes also are known as models (e.g., the Waterfall Model).