Subject: Software Engineering

Topic: Matrics for Process & Projects

Difficulty: High

Software design is a process to conceptualize the software requirements into software implementation. Software design takes the user requirements as challenges and tries to find optimum solution. While the software is being conceptualized, a plan is chalked out to find the best possible design for implementing the intended solution. Structured design is a conceptualization of problem into several well-organized elements of solution.

It is basically concerned with the solution design. Benefit of structured design is, it gives better understanding of how the problem is being solved. Structured design also makes it simpler for designer to concentrate on the problem more accurately. Structured design is mostly based on ‘divide and conquer’ strategy where a problem is broken into several small problems and each small problem is individually solved until the whole problem is solved. It keeps creating higher level components until the desired system is not evolved as one single component. With each higher level, the amount of abstraction is increased.

Bottom-up strategy is more suitable when a system needs to be created from some existing system, where the basic primitives can be used in the newer system.

a. Difficult to measure LOC in the early stages of a new product.

b. Source instructions vary with coding languages, design methods and with programmer’s ability.

c. No industry standard for measuring LOC.

d. LOC cannot be used for normalizing if platforms and languages are different.

e. The only way to predict LOC for a new app to be developed is through analogy based on similar software application.

f. Programmers may be rewarded for writing more LOC based on a misconception of higher management by thinking that more the LOC, means more the productivity of the programmer.