You work for a software engineering consultancy. ... The organisation writes and maintains both business and real-time applications. Show and describe three ways by which this affects their software engineering processes.
Real-Time Software
“A real-time system is a software system where the correct functioning of the system depends on the results produced by the system and the time at which these results are produced. A ‘soft’ real-time system is a system whose operation is degraded if results are not produced according to the specified timing requirements. A ‘hard’ real-time system is a system whose operation is incorrect if results are not produced according to the timing specification.”
Hardware
Real-time software does not appear on traditional computers. Most often real-time software is embedded in specific hardware, such as in many commonplace appliances. This means that the software is often very specific, with specific hardware to match. Normal business software usually does not have these hardware constraints because it runs on a computer with an operating system, and therefore does not interact directly with the hardware.
Differences In Software
Real-time software has constraints such as timing, signal processing, etc. ... Thus the real-time software engineering process may involve special-purpose design of hardware to be used with the real-time software. Thus real-time system design is different from traditional or business software design. Traditional business software does not have to respond to irregular events, and so its software design is also much simpler than that of real-time systems.
Programming Languages
Due to real-time software’s extensive demands on “real-time” deadlines, the programming languages used has to be advanced enough to be able to process events using time related concepts, such as threads. Often low-level programming languages are used for real-time software because of their compiled efficiency and timeliness. Business software is usually programmed using high-level languages because they use GUIs (graphical user interfaces) and have more powerful functions to perform.
Conclusion
Specialised hardware is used in the development as well as the implementation of real-time software, whereas business software runs on the more generic computer hardware.
The differences between real-time and business software mean that their design processes are also different. The irregular nature of real-time software events has to be taken into account when designing the software. Business software does not have this additional concern. ... Business software can use one of many programming languages all suited for that type of development, however real-time software has fewer programming languages to choose from due to it’s more critical constraints. ... Estimate a “best guess” delivery date, given that 3 software engineers are available for the project. ... In other words, these systems, although often 10+ years old, are still critical to the business. ...
Re-engineering and Redesign
So changing from a mainframe system to a client-server system would involve some sort of re-engineering of the system. ...
Poor Software Requirements
One of the five most common problems in software development is poor requirements. ...
Unrealistic Schedule
Unrealistic schedules often cause many problems, due to too much work being needed to be done in too little time.
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