This course, Approaches to software development, presents an engineering approach to the development of software systems – a software engineering approach. The course pays particular attention to issues of software quality, in terms of both product (what is built) and process (how we build it).

Course learning outcomes

After studying this course, you should be able to:

- describe the essential characteristics, and identify, using examples, the connections between the characteristics of a good software system

- describe the elements of a basic software development process and illustrate the variety of different life cycles

- explain the benefits of the Unified Modeling Language (UML) as a standard notation for modelling

- identify the different kinds of model used in the development of software and describe the relationship between models, viewpoints and software development.