Any application on computer runs through software.
As computer technologies have changed tremendously in the last five decades,
accordingly, the software development has undergone significant changes in the
last few decades of 20th century. In the early years, the software size used to
be small and those were developed either by a single programmer or by a small
programming team. The program development was dependent on the programmer’s
skills and no strategic software practices were present. In the early 1980s,
the size of software and the application domain of software increased.
Consequently, its complexity has also increased. Bigger teams were engaged in
the development of Software. The software development became more bit organised
and software development management practices came into existence.
In this period, higher order programming languages
like PASCAL and COBOL came into existence. The use of these made programming
much easier. In this decade, some structural design practices like top down
approach were introduced. The concept of quality assurance was also introduced.
However, the business aspects like cost estimation, time estimation etc. of
software were in their elementary stages.
In the late 1980s and 1990s, software development
underwent revolutionary changes. Instead of a programming team in an
organisation, full-fledged software companies evolved (called software houses).
A software houses primary business is to produce software. As software house
may offer a range of services, including hiring out of suitably qualified
personnel to work within client’s team, consultancy and a complete system
design and development service. The output of these companies was ‘Software’.
Thus, they viewed the software as a product and its functionality as a process.
The concept of software engineering was introduced and Software became more
strategic, disciplined and commercial. As the developer of Software and user of
Software became separate organisation, business concepts like software costing,
Software quality, laying of well-defined requirements, Software reliability,
etc., came into existence. In this phase an entirely new computing environments
based on a knowledge-based systems get created. Moreover, a powerful new
concept of object oriented programming was also introduced.
The production of software became much commercial.
The software development tools were devised. The concept of Computer Aided
Software Engineering (CASE) tools came into existence. The software development
became faster with the help of CASE tools.
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