Transcript 16.355 Software Engineering Concepts 16.842

16.355 Software Engineering Concepts
16.842 System Engineering
Prof. Nancy Leveson
Fall 2013
Is There A Problem?
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AAS (FAA Advanced Automation System) [$3-6B]
FBI CIC
IRS Modernization Program [$4B]
Denver Baggage System [$200M]
Mars Program losses (MCO, MPL, other close calls)
Hubble
X-33 Reusable Launch Vehicle
Military aircraft
Dreamliner (Boeing 787)
Software Difficulties
• Head of AF Systems Command: “Software is the Achilles heel
of weapons development”
• 7 out of every 10 major weapons development programs are
encountering software problems and the rate is increasing
• Failure or cancellation rate of large software is over 20%
• 65% of very large systems (over 1,000,000 LOC) are
cancelled before completion
• Average cancelled project in U.S. is about a year behind
schedule and has consumed 200% of expected budget.
• Of completed projects
– 2/3 experience schedule delays and cost overruns (bad
estimates?)
– 2/3 experience low reliability and quality problems in first year of
deployment
• Have you ever been on a project where the software was
never finished or used?
• Have you been on a system engineering project that ran
into serious difficulties?
Some Frequently Cited Factors
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Underestimation of complexity
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Failure to establish appropriate control over requirements and/or
scope
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Inadequate communication
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Failure to engage stakeholders
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Inadequate testing
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Lack of oversight or poor project management
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Poor quality implementations
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Lack of risk management
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Failure to specify/address performance requirements
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Poorly planned/managed transitions
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Excessive process to prevent previous problems
Types of Problem Projects (Yourdan)
• Mission Impossible
Likely to succeed, happy workers
• Ugly
Likely to succeed, unhappy workers
• Kamikaze
Unlikely to succeed, happy workers
• Suicide
Unlikely to succeed, unhappy workers
Software Death March Projects
• Feature creep
• Thrashing
• Integration problems
• Overwriting source code (configuration control issues)
• Constant re-estimation
• Redesign and rewriting during test
• No documentation of design decisions
• Etc.
Understanding the Problem
Understanding the Problem (2)
Laws of Maintenance (Belady and
Lehman)
• Software will continually change
• Software will become increasingly unstructured as it
changes
• Why is software engineering hard?
• Is software engineering more difficult than hardware
engineering?
• Why or why not?
The Computer Revolution
Accident with No Component Failures
Abstraction from Physical Design
• Software engineers are doing physical design
Autopilot
Expert
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Requirements
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Software
Engineer

Design
of
Autopilot
• Most operational software errors related to requirements (particularly
incompleteness)
• Software “failure modes” are different
– Usually does exactly what you tell it to do
– Problems occur from operation, not lack of operation
– Usually doing exactly what software engineers wanted
The Curse of Flexibility
• “Software is the resting place of afterthoughts”
• No physical constraints
– To enforce discipline on design, construction, and
modification
– To control complexity
• So flexible that start working with it before fully
understanding what need to do
• The untrained can get partial success
“Scaling up is hard to do”
• “And they looked upon the software and saw that it was
good. But they just had to add one other feature …”
Other Factors
• Large discrete state spaces
– Continuous vs. discrete math
– Cannot test exhaustively
• Intangibility
– Invisible interfaces
– Hard to experiment with and manage
– Hard to diagnose problems
• No historic usage information
– To allow measurement, evaluation, and improvement of standard
designs over time
– Always specially constructed
– Usually doing new things
Black Box Testing
White Box Testing
White Box Testing (2)
Class Objectives
• Students will be able to evaluate SE techniques and
approaches
“It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin barefoot
irreverence to their studies. They are here not to worship what is known,
but to question it.” Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man
“The developed theories … have rarely been subjected to empirical
testing, and so their value remains unknown. They provide zealots with
opportunities to market a rash of seminars and courses and to flood the
literature with papers advocating the new technologies. When the
theories are subjected to testing, what little evidence has been obtained
sometimes suggests that the claimed benefits, in fact, may not exist.”
Vessey and Weber
Arguments may involve:
Proof by vigorous handwaving
Unsupported hypotheses
False analogies
• Students will be able to exercise professional judgement in
selecting an approach for a particular project
Assignments
• No programming or class projects
• Reading summaries
– Main ideas or themes
– Critical evaluation or specific questions to answer
– Any additional thoughts
• Some additional short assignments
• Additional reading for those preparing for Quals Exam