• Table of Contents

Software Development

The six main activities of the software development life cycle is as shown below:

Figure 1.1 Main activities in software development.

We have covered some of them in our previous COE courses. For this course specifically, we are focusing on the system design aspect of software development.

• During requirements elicitation & analysis, we concentrated on the purpose and functionality of the system.
• During system design, we focus on the processes, data structures, and software and hardware components necessary to implement it.
• Using a house analogy:
  • You can think of requirement elicitation & analysis as what defines the number of rooms, number of floors, size of living area, and etc.
  • Then, system design is the floor plan of the house — where things should be located.

System Design and Software Architecture

The main output of the system design phase is the software architecture, in terms of the:

• design goals
• system decomposition

Software architecture is a creative exercise, requiring considerable knowledge, experience and discipline, thus developers select strategies for building the system, such as the hardware/software strategy, the persistent data management strategy.

As an example, we’ll use a learning management system (LMS) as reference.

<aside> <img src="/icons/map-pin_gray.svg" alt="/icons/map-pin_gray.svg" width="40px" /> An LMS is a software application for the administration, documentation, tracking, reporting, automation, and delivery of educational courses — like D2L.

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Let’s consider what are the main software components that make up an LMS?

Figure 1.2 Software components of an LMS.

We can simplify it into the three components as shown above. Now ask yourself, what is the relationships between these components? There are many important design decision you need to make when designing the system.