Some Long-Standing Quality Practices in Software Development

TL;DR

This paper reviews long-standing quality practices in software development across different methodologies, highlighting persistent practices like prototyping and iterative development that contribute to high-quality software.

Contribution

It identifies key enduring quality practices in software development history and analyzes their roles across various development methods.

Findings

Prototyping, iterative and incremental development are persistent practices.

Risk-driven development and phase retrospection have remained relevant.

These practices are valuable for designing high-quality software methods.

Abstract

The desire to build quality software systems has been the focus of most software developers and researchers for decades. This has culminated in the design of practices that promote quality in the designed software. Originating from the inception of the traditional software development life cycle (SDLC), through to the object-oriented methods, Iterative development, and now the agile methods, these practices have persisted through different periods. Such practices play the same quality role regardless of the perspective of the software development process they are part of. In this paper we review three software development methods representative of the software development history, with the aim of i) identifying key quality practices, ii) identifying the quality role played by the practice in the method, and iii) noting those quality practices that have persisted through the software development history. The identified quality practices that have persisted throughout the history of the software development processes include prototyping, iterative development, incremental development, risk-driven development, phase planning, and phase retrospection. These results would be useful to method engineers who seek to design high-quality software development methods as these practices serve as candidates for inclusion in their development processes. Software development practitioners seeking to design quality software would also benefit from adopting these practices in developing their software.