Software Design for Six Sigma: A Roadmap for Excellence

Chapter 2. TRADITIONAL SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT PROCESSES^[18]

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 ...