Software documentation is written text or illustration that accompanies computer software or is embedded in the source code. The documentation either explains how the software operates or how to use it, and may mean different things to people in different roles.
Inspection in software engineering, refers to peer review of any work product by trained individuals who look for defects using a well defined process. An inspection might also be referred to as a Fagan inspection after Michael Fagan, the creator of a very popular software inspection process.
In systems engineering and software engineering, requirements analysis focuses on the tasks that determine the needs or conditions to meet the new or altered product or project, taking account of the possibly conflicting requirements of the various stakeholders, analyzing, documenting, validating, and managing software or system requirements.
Code review is a software quality assurance activity in which one or more people check a program, mainly by viewing and reading parts of its source code, either after implementation or as an interruption of implementation. At least one of the persons must not have authored the code. The persons performing the checking, excluding the author, are called "reviewers".
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, information systems and software engineering, the systems development life cycle (SDLC), also referred to as the application development life cycle, is a process for planning, creating, testing, and deploying an information system. The SDLC concept applies to a range of hardware and software configurations, as a system can be composed of hardware only, software only, or a combination of both. There are usually six stages in this cycle: requirement analysis, design, development and testing, implementation, documentation, and evaluation.
Requirements engineering (RE) is the process of defining, documenting, and maintaining requirements in the engineering design process. It is a common role in systems engineering and software engineering.
A Fagan inspection is a process of trying to find defects in documents during various phases of the software development process. It is named after Michael Fagan, who is credited with the invention of formal software inspections.
A test plan is a document detailing the objectives, resources, and processes for a specific test session for a software or hardware product. The plan typically contains a detailed understanding of the eventual workflow.
Behavior-driven development (BDD) involves naming software tests using domain language to describe the behavior of the code.
A Software management review is a management study into a project's status and allocation of resources. It is different from both a software engineering peer review, which evaluates the technical quality of software products, and a software audit, which is an externally conducted audit into a project's compliance to specifications, contractual agreements, and other criteria.
In software development, peer review is a type of software review in which a work product is examined by author's colleagues, in order to evaluate the work product's technical content and quality.
A software review is "a process or meeting during which a software product is examined by a project personnel, managers, users, customers, user representatives, or other interested parties for comment or approval".
In software engineering, a walkthrough or walk-through is a form of software peer review "in which a designer or programmer leads members of the development team and other interested parties through a software product, and the participants ask questions and make comments about possible errors, violation of development standards, and other problems". The reviews are also performed by assessors, specialists, etc. and are suggested or mandatory as required by norms and standards.
A software audit review, or software audit, is a type of software review in which one or more auditors who are not members of the software development organization conduct "An independent examination of a software product, software process, or set of software processes to assess compliance with specifications, standards, contractual agreements, or other criteria".
IEEE 1471 is a superseded IEEE standard for describing the architecture of a "software-intensive system", also known as software architecture.
A design history file is a compilation of documentation that describes the design history of a finished medical device. The design history file, or DHF, is part of regulation introduced in 1990 when the U.S. Congress passed the Safe Medical Devices Act, which established new standards for medical devices that can cause or contribute to the death, serious illness, or injury of a patient. Prior to this legislation, U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) auditors were limited to examining the production and quality control records of the device.
A specification often refers to a set of documented requirements to be satisfied by a material, design, product, or service. A specification is often a type of technical standard.
Software requirements for a system are the description of what the system should do, the service or services that it provides and the constraints on its operation. The IEEE Standard Glossary of Software Engineering Terminology defines a requirement as:
- A condition or capability needed by a user to solve a problem or achieve an objective
- A condition or capability that must be met or possessed by a system or system component to satisfy a contract, standard, specification, or other formally imposed document
- A documented representation of a condition or capability as in 1 or 2
In engineering, technical peer review is a well defined review process for finding and correcting defects conducted by a team of peers with assigned roles. Technical peer reviews are carried out by peers representing areas of life cycle affected by material being reviewed. Technical peer reviews are held within development phases, between milestone reviews, on completed products, or on completed portions of products. A technical peer review may also be called an engineering peer review, a product peer review, a peer review/inspection or an inspection.
