On Improving Communication Software Development Process

Abstract

This paper aims to standardize the software development process by making use of the well-established hardware development process. The procedure can be applied to any engineering software development process, but we consider the case of communication systems. We propose a model for software development process that has a hierarchical structure. We examine this hierarchical structure together with the development process at each level. Each process has several stages, and we use the same definitions at all levels. The development process consists of the following stages: requirements and specification, flow detailed structure, source coding, and testing stages. Integration of the whole system is performed in steps through different testing levels. During the development process we measure the performance or the quality of each stage. We consider the factors that have great impact on software quality and that may be the cause of defects. These includes complexity, supporting tools and methods, and system ability, and from these factors we define some quality attributes to measure the system quality.