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Software Engineering for Students A Programming Approach

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20 Chapter 1 ■ <strong>Software</strong> – problems and prospects<br />

Answers to self-test questions<br />

1.1 50 people at a cost of $12.5 million.<br />

1.2 Hardware: $1,000.<br />

<strong>Software</strong>: $100.<br />

To buy, the hardware is approximately ten times the cost of the software.<br />

1.3 Examples are a Web browser and a telephone switching system.<br />

1.4 Examples of safety critical systems: an ABS braking system on a car, a fire<br />

alarm system, a patient record system in a health center.<br />

Examples of systems that are not safety critical are a payroll system, a<br />

word processor, a game program.<br />

1.5 Some well-known word processor programs incorporate the facility to<br />

search <strong>for</strong> a file. This facility is not always easy to use, especially when it<br />

fails to find a file that you know is there somewhere.<br />

The DOS operating system provides a command-line command to delete<br />

a file or any number of files. Coupled with the “wild card” feature, denoted<br />

by an asterisk, it is easy to delete more files than you plan, <strong>for</strong> example:<br />

del *.*<br />

Further reading<br />

•Accounts of failed projects are given in Stephen Flowers, <strong>Software</strong> Failure: Management<br />

Failure: Amazing Stories and Cautionary Tales, Stephen Flowers, John Wiley, 1996,<br />

and in Robert Glass, <strong>Software</strong> Runaways, Prentice Hall, 1998.<br />

This is a good read if you are interested in how software projects really get done and<br />

what life is like at Microsoft. G. Pasacal Zachary, Show-Stopper: The Breakneck Race<br />

to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft, Free Press, a division<br />

of Macmillan, Inc., 1994.<br />

A very readable and classic account of the problems of developing large-scale software<br />

is given in the following book, which was written by the man in charge of the development<br />

of the software <strong>for</strong> an IBM mainframe range of computers. It has been<br />

republished as a celebratory second edition with additional essays. Frederick P.<br />

Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month, Addison-Wesley, 2nd edn, 1995.<br />

One of the key design goals of Java is portability. A compelling account of the arguments<br />

<strong>for</strong> portable software is given in Peter Van Der Linden, Not Just Java, Sun<br />

Microsystems Press; Prentice Hall, 1998.

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