Software Crisis & Software Evalution

# Software Crisis

Developments in software technology continue to be dynamic. New tools and techniques are announced in quick succession. This has forced the software engineers and industry to continuously look for new approaches to software design and development, and they are becoming more and more critical in view of the increasing complexity of software systems as well as the highly competitive nature of the industry. These rapid advances appear to have created a situation of crisis within the industry. The following issued need to be addressed to face the crisis:

• How to represent real-life entities of problems in system design?

• How to design system with open interfaces?

• How to ensure reusability and extensibility of modules?

• How to develop modules that are tolerant of any changes in future?

• How to improve software productivity and decrease software cost?

• How to improve the quality of software?

• How to manage time schedules?

# Software Evaluation

Ernest Tello, A well known writer in the field of artificial intelligence, compared the evolution of software technology to the growth of the tree. Like a tree, the software evolution has had distinct phases “layers” of growth. These layers were building up one by one over the last five decades as shown in fig. 1.1, with each layer representing and improvement over the previous one. However, the analogy fails if we consider the life of these layers. In software system each of the layers continues to be functional, whereas in the case of trees, only the uppermost layer is functional Alan Kay, one of the promoters of the object-oriented paradigm and the principal designer of Smalltalk, has said: “As complexity increases, architecture dominates the basic materials”. To build today’s complex software it is just not enough to put together a sequence of programming statements and sets of procedures and modules; we need to incorporate sound construction techniques and program structures that are easy to comprehend implement and modify.

With the advent of languages such as c, structured programming became very popular and was the main technique of the 1980’s. Structured programming was a powerful tool that enabled programmers to write moderately complex programs fairly easily. However, as the programs grew larger, even the structured approach failed to show the desired result in terms of bug-free, easy-to- maintain, and reusable programs.

Object Oriented Programming (OOP) is an approach to program organization and development that attempts to eliminate some of the pitfalls of conventional programming methods by incorporating the best of structured programming features with several powerful new concepts. It is a new way of organizing and developing programs and has nothing to do with any particular language. However, not all languages are suitable to implement the OOP concepts easily.