Evolutionary design, continuous design, evolutive design, or incremental design is directly related to any modular design application, in which components can be freely substituted to improve the design, modify performance, or change another feature at a later time.
In particular, it applies (with the name continuous design) to software development. In this field it is a practice of creating and modifying the design of a system as it is developed, rather than purporting to specify the system completely before development starts (as in the waterfall model). Continuous design was popularized by extreme programming. Continuous design also uses test driven development and refactoring. Martin Fowler wrote a popular book called Refactoring, as well as a popular article entitled "Is Design Dead?", that talked about continuous/evolutionary design. James Shore wrote an article in IEEE titled "Continuous Design".
Modular design states that a product is made of subsystems that are joined together to create a full product. [1] The above design model defined in electronics and evolved in industrial design into well consolidated industrial standards related to platform concept and its evolution. [2]
An integrated development environment (IDE) is a software application that provides comprehensive facilities for software development. An IDE normally consists of at least a source-code editor, build automation tools, and a debugger. Some IDEs, such as IntelliJ IDEA, Eclipse and Lazarus contain the necessary compiler, interpreter or both; others, such as SharpDevelop and NetBeans, do not.
In computer programming and software design, code refactoring is the process of restructuring existing computer code—changing the factoring—without changing its external behavior. Refactoring is intended to improve the design, structure, and/or implementation of the software, while preserving its functionality. Potential advantages of refactoring may include improved code readability and reduced complexity; these can improve the source code's maintainability and create a simpler, cleaner, or more expressive internal architecture or object model to improve extensibility. Another potential goal for refactoring is improved performance; software engineers face an ongoing challenge to write programs that perform faster or use less memory.
Iterative and incremental development is any combination of both iterative design or iterative method and incremental build model for development.
Software design is the process of conceptualizing how a software system will work before it is implemented or modified. Software design also refers to the direct result of the design process – the concepts of how the software will work which consists of both design documentation and undocumented concepts.
Rapid application development (RAD), also called rapid application building (RAB), is both a general term for adaptive software development approaches, and the name for James Martin's method of rapid development. In general, RAD approaches to software development put less emphasis on planning and more emphasis on an adaptive process. Prototypes are often used in addition to or sometimes even instead of design specifications.
Software development is the process used to create software. Programming and maintaining the source code is the central step of this process, but it also includes conceiving the project, evaluating its feasibility, analyzing the business requirements, software design, testing, to release. Software engineering, in addition to development, also includes project management, employee management, and other overhead functions. Software development may be sequential, in which each step is complete before the next begins, but iterative development methods where multiple steps can be executed at once and earlier steps can be revisited have also been devised to improve flexibility, efficiency, and scheduling.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to software engineering:
Test-driven development (TDD) is a way of writing code that involves writing an automated unit-level test case that fails, then writing just enough code to make the test pass, then refactoring both the test code and the production code, then repeating with another new test case.
Broadly speaking, modularity is the degree to which a system's components may be separated and recombined, often with the benefit of flexibility and variety in use. The concept of modularity is used primarily to reduce complexity by breaking a system into varying degrees of interdependence and independence across and "hide the complexity of each part behind an abstraction and interface". However, the concept of modularity can be extended to multiple disciplines, each with their own nuances. Despite these nuances, consistent themes concerning modular systems can be identified.
Gen is a Computer Aided Software Engineering (CASE) application development environment marketed by Broadcom Inc. Gen was previously known as CA Gen,IEF, Composer by IEF, Composer, COOL:Gen, Advantage:Gen and AllFusion Gen.
In software testing, test automation is the use of software separate from the software being tested to control the execution of tests and the comparison of actual outcomes with predicted outcomes. Test automation can automate some repetitive but necessary tasks in a formalized testing process already in place, or perform additional testing that would be difficult to do manually. Test automation is critical for continuous delivery and continuous testing.
Software prototyping is the activity of creating prototypes of software applications, i.e., incomplete versions of the software program being developed. It is an activity that can occur in software development and is comparable to prototyping as known from other fields, such as mechanical engineering or manufacturing.
ISO 10303 is an ISO standard for the computer-interpretable representation and exchange of product manufacturing information. It is an ASCII-based format. Its official title is: Automation systems and integration — Product data representation and exchange. It is known informally as "STEP", which stands for "Standard for the Exchange of Product model data". ISO 10303 can represent 3D objects in Computer-aided design (CAD) and related information.
Modular design, or modularity in design, is a design principle that subdivides a system into smaller parts called modules, which can be independently created, modified, replaced, or exchanged with other modules or between different systems.
Software evolution is the continual development of a piece of software after its initial release to address changing stakeholder and/or market requirements. Software evolution is important because organizations invest large amounts of money in their software and are completely dependent on this software. Software evolution helps software adapt to changing businesses requirements, fix defects, and integrate with other changing systems in a software system environment.
In software development and other information technology fields, technical debt is the implied cost of future reworking required when choosing an easy but limited solution instead of a better approach that could take more time.
Morphogenetic robotics generally refers to the methodologies that address challenges in robotics inspired by biological morphogenesis.
Extreme programming (XP) is a software development methodology intended to improve software quality and responsiveness to changing customer requirements. As a type of agile software development, it advocates frequent releases in short development cycles, intended to improve productivity and introduce checkpoints at which new customer requirements can be adopted.
In software engineering, a microservice architecture is a variant of the service-oriented architecture structural style. It is an architectural pattern that arranges an application as a collection of loosely coupled, fine-grained services, communicating through lightweight protocols. One of its goals is that teams can develop and deploy their services independently of others. This is achieved by the reduction of several dependencies in the code base, allowing developers to evolve their services with limited restrictions from users, and for additional complexity to be hidden from users. As a consequence, organizations are able to develop software with fast growth and size, as well as use off-the-shelf services more easily. Communication requirements are reduced. These benefits come at a cost to maintaining the decoupling. Interfaces need to be designed carefully and treated as a public API. One technique that is used is having multiple interfaces on the same service, or multiple versions of the same service, so as to not disrupt existing users of the code.
Evolutionary database design involves incremental improvements to the database schema so that it can be continuously updated with changes, reflecting the customer's requirements. People across the globe work on the same piece of software at the same time hence, there is a need for techniques that allow a smooth evolution of database as the design develops. Such methods utilize automated refactoring and continuous integration so that it supports agile methodologies for software development. These development techniques are applied on systems that are in pre-production stage as well on systems that have already been released. These techniques not only cover relevant changes in the database schema according to customer's changing needs, but also migration of modified data into the database and also customizing the database access code accordingly without changing the data semantics.