7.2 Listening
Give students time to read questions 1 and 2. Remind them they will only hear the recording once.
37
Play Part 1. 1. Give students time to compare their answers.
Feed back verbally and confirm the correct answers. Elicit that the phrases benefits of the waterfall method and project management are mentioned, but the speaker states they will not discuss these in the talk. Explain that, sometimes, speakers will state what they won’t be talking about, as well as what they will cover.
Answers Topic
the importance of software
Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC)
Will the lecturer talk about it?
yes yes
benefits of the waterfall method no agile methodologies project management software quality
yes no
yes
2. Elicit ideas from the class. Accept any reasonable answers, and feed back verbally.
Answer
The Software Development Life Cycle is a particular approach to software development: a model for software development.
37 Part 1
Good morning, everybody. So my talk today is about software development and a particular approach to software development: a model, if you like. It’s called the SDLC – the Software Development Life Cycle. So, I think you may have done a little about this earlier in your course. Does anybody know how many stages there are in this model? Very good … we usually say seven stages – but it can be five or eight … depending on the level of detail we need. So, first of all, I want to ask if you think software development is important? … I can see some of you nodding … yes, software development is very important, because without software, all the hardware that is part of our daily lives would not function. Creating high-quality software as efficiently as possible is very important and, today, I’m going to talk about some ways of doing this. Before I go into detail on SDLC, I want to point out
that the way in which software is developed has changed a lot over time … and I think it will help you if I mention two different methodologies to help you think about
this. So … in the beginning, development was a linear process: you decided what you wanted the software to do and then you wrote software which could do this. So the most common linear methodology was known as the waterfall method, because all of the activities flowed on from each other. The waterfall methods can be useful for some projects, but we’re not going to talk about this today … One of the drawbacks that the waterfall method had was that it assumed that there would be no changes while the software development was happening. In reality, many things were changing, often quite quickly. New technologies were being developed, new requirements for the software were identified and added on – a process known as ‘feature creep’. So, a different set of methodologies emerged which
are iterative, as opposed to linear. You may have heard of agile methodologies – which are iterative in nature. Iterative means that you do the same thing over and over again, so with software development it can mean that you create a simple version of the software and then add more features in different iterations. This means that users will have a much better idea of what they want the software to do and their feedback can help the developers to design software which is close to what the users want. I’m not really going to talk about project
management here, that’s something you will cover in other lectures, but it is very difficult to separate the work of software development from project management – which happens at a much higher level. So, SDLC is at a lower level than the overall project management, but it links into the project management because it gives the managers a tool to help them manage. It makes planning, estimating and scheduling more efficient, so it makes it easier if you are trying to track what is happening on a specific project or trying to decide how much time and resources specific deliverables will need. Another advantage is that it makes it easier to show different stakeholders involved in the development process which stage different aspects are at, so they are able to understand how the project overall is progressing and also where their input feeds into the process. Also, because there is better management of the process, it is likely that the speed of the software development will be greater, without reducing the quality. So, in some ways, we can see it as a project management approach – which we will discuss in another session … today we’re going to focus more on the software specifics …
C
Before playing Part 2 of the recording, give students time to read the questions. Elicit the advantages and disadvantages of different types of note-taking format for this lecture. Accept any reasonable suggestions, referring students to their notes from Unit 1 if they find this difficult.
1.3 Choosing a note-taking format SKILLS BANK
You could refer them back to Skills Bank 1.3 at this point. 135
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