Tools and Techniques for Requirements Engineering and Management - Requirements Engineering and Management for Software Development Projects - page 181

individuals involved in the development of these standards need not necessarily be
the members of IEEE. The volunteers work without any compensation too. All the
standards developed by IEEE are subject to peer review and voting before they are
released. All the standards are periodically reviewed and the revised versions are
regularly released. IEEE standards are highly respected and are implemented in the
products and interfaces all over the world.
I am proud and feel privileged to be admitted to the IEEE in the first place and
be elevated to the category of Senior Member in the second place.
IEEE undertook development of standards for the field of software engineering
and released the first set in 1988. Some of these are revised and re-released in
1997-1998. There is great wisdom in these standards. Many organizations have
adopted these standards. The process model CMM (Capability Maturity Model)
released by SEI (Software Engineering Institute of the Carnegie Mellon Univer-
sity) in 1998 emphasized IEEE standards in its model document, even though, this
emphasis is dropped in its later versions of CMMI (CMM Integration).
IEEE standards advocate a methodical and process driven approach. One
important aspect to be noted here is that implementing IEEE standards has not
failed any organization so far!
Table 13.1 gives a list of software engineering standards released so far.
All of these standards promote methodical working and implementation of
industry best practices. They focus on large scale projects but allow scaling to suit
smaller projects. The standards relevant to Requirements Engineering and Man-
agement are, 610, 830, 1028, 1028, 1044, 1233 and P1805. IEEE continues to
develop and improve the standards and some more standards will continue to be
released. IEEE has initiated a project (P1805) on the language to be used for
defining requirements for software projects. It may be released soon.
Implementing IEEE standards in the organization is one of the best practices, in
software development in general and REM in particular.
13.4 Object Oriented Methodology
Object Oriented programming brought real-world thinking into software devel-
opment. In the real-world there are objects that have characteristics and functions.
How the objects perform and use the characteristics and produce results is not of
concern to the outside world. Therefore, the programs were modified to resemble
real-world objects.
Object oriented methodology is a software development methodology that
views software development as development of objects (instead of programs) that
can be assembled into a software product. Each object is not a complete stand-
alone unit but is a component that can be picked up and used along with other
objects to assemble a software product. Each object has data structures built into it
along with the methods (small programs or functions or subprograms) that utilize
it. The object encapsulates (conceals) the methods and the data structure from