Maintainability is the ease of maintaining or providing maintenance for a functioning product or service. Depending on the field, it can have slightly different meanings.
Software architecture is the set of structures needed to reason about a software system and the discipline of creating such structures and systems. Each structure comprises software elements, relations among them, and properties of both elements and relations.
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.
In engineering, a requirement is a condition that must be satisfied for the output of a work effort to be acceptable. It is an explicit, objective, clear and often quantitative description of a condition to be satisfied by a material, design, product, or service.
In systems engineering, dependability is a measure of a system's availability, reliability, maintainability, and in some cases, other characteristics such as durability, safety and security. In real-time computing, dependability is the ability to provide services that can be trusted within a time-period. The service guarantees must hold even when the system is subject to attacks or natural failures.
In the context of software engineering, software quality refers to two related but distinct notions:
ISO/IEC 9126Software engineering — Product quality was an international standard for the evaluation of software quality. It has been replaced by ISO/IEC 25010:2011.
Extensibility is a software engineering and systems design principle that provides for future growth. Extensibility is a measure of the ability to extend a system and the level of effort required to implement the extension. Extensions can be through the addition of new functionality or through modification of existing functionality. The principle provides for enhancements without impairing existing system functions.
Reliability engineering is a sub-discipline of systems engineering that emphasizes the ability of equipment to function without failure. Reliability is defined as the probability that a product, system, or service will perform its intended function adequately for a specified period of time, OR will operate in a defined environment without failure. Reliability is closely related to availability, which is typically described as the ability of a component or system to function at a specified moment or interval of time.
A software architect is a software engineer responsible for high-level design choices related to overall system structure and behavior.
In systems engineering and requirements engineering, a non-functional requirement (NFR) is a requirement that specifies criteria that can be used to judge the operation of a system, rather than specific behaviours. They are contrasted with functional requirements that define specific behavior or functions. The plan for implementing functional requirements is detailed in the system design. The plan for implementing non-functional requirements is detailed in the system architecture, because they are usually architecturally significant requirements.
Software safety is an engineering discipline that aims to ensure that software, which is used in safety-related systems, does not contribute to any hazards such a system might pose. There are numerous standards that govern the way how safety-related software should be developed and assured in various domains. Most of them classify software according to their criticality and propose techniques and measures that should be employed during the development and assurance:
Coding best practices or programming best practices are a set of informal, sometimes personal, rules that many software developers, in computer programming follow to improve software quality. Many computer programs require being robust and reliable for long periods of time, so any rules need to facilitate both initial development and subsequent maintenance of source code by people other than the original authors.
FURPS is an acronym representing a model for classifying software quality attributes :
Quality engineering is the discipline of engineering concerned with the principles and practice of product and service quality assurance and control. In software development, it is the management, development, operation and maintenance of IT systems and enterprise architectures with high quality standard.
In software engineering and hardware engineering, serviceability is one of the -ilities or aspects. It refers to the ability of technical support personnel to install, configure, and monitor computer products, identify exceptions or faults, debug or isolate faults to root cause analysis, and provide hardware or software maintenance in pursuit of solving a problem and restoring the product into service. Incorporating serviceability facilitating features typically results in more efficient product maintenance and reduces operational costs and maintains business continuity.
In software engineering, a software development process or software development life cycle is a process of planning and managing software development. It typically involves dividing software development work into smaller, parallel, or sequential steps or sub-processes to improve design and/or product management. The methodology may include the pre-definition of specific deliverables and artifacts that are created and completed by a project team to develop or maintain an application.
Operational acceptance testing (OAT) is used to conduct operational readiness (pre-release) of a product, service, or system as part of a quality management system. OAT is a common type of non-functional software testing, used mainly in software development and software maintenance projects. This type of testing focuses on the operational readiness of the system to be supported, and/or to become part of the production environment. Hence, it is also known as operational readiness testing (ORT) or operations readiness and assurance testing (OR&A). Functional testing within OAT is limited to those tests which are required to verify the non-functional aspects of the system.
SQALE is a method to support the evaluation of a software application source code. It is a generic method, independent of the language and source code analysis tools, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported license. Software editors can freely use and implement the SQALE method.
Architecturally significant requirements are those requirements that have a measurable effect on a computer system’s architecture. This can comprise both software and hardware requirements. They are a subset of requirements, the subset that affects the architecture of a system in measurably identifiable ways.
