What is the state of the art in software?

In software engineering, the software life cycle is a frequently used manner of organizing the software development process. Figure 2 shows a strongly simplified version of the life cycle taken from a standard textbook [13]. There are many models for software development but in most models one can distinguish the following five phases:

• Requirements engineering: collect the requirements and expectations from the future owners and users of the system.
• Design: translate the requirements in a specification that describes the global architecture and the functionality of the system.
• Implementation: build the system.This amounts to transforming the design into software source code.
• Testing: test that the implemented system conforms to the specification.
• Maintenance: install, maintain and gradually improve the system.

It should be emphasized that the software life cycle covers design and construction of a software product as well as its use. Each phase contains a Validation and Verification (V&V) sub-phase in which the quality of the deliverables of that phases are controlled. Also note the backward arrows that make this into a real ``cycle'': it is possible to become aware in later phases that decisions made in a previous phase have to be revised.

The state of the art in software is the explicit body of knowledge about software engineering that is documented in:

• The Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK) [10].
• University curricula.
• Text books.
• Publications by professional organizations such as Association for Computing Machinery (ACM, see [1]) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE, see [6]).
• Web sites and mailing lists related to software projects.
• Publicly available results of the software engineering life cycle from software projects. This includes all artefacts of the life cycle, including designs, source code, and documentation.
• Lectures, courses, and oral presentations about software engineering topics.

Figure 2: The software life cycle