Exploratory style vs. modern style of software development. | software development | software engineering

 Difference between Exploratory style and  modern style of software development

 An important difference is that the exploratory software development style is based on error correction while the software engineering principles are primarily based on error prevention. Inherent in the software engineering principles is the realization that it is much more cost-effective to prevent errors from occurring than to correct them as and when they are detected.
Even when errors occur, software engineering principles emphasize detection of errors as close to the point where the errors are committed as possible. In the exploratory style, errors are detected only during the final product testing. In contrast, the modern practice of software development is to develop the software through several well-defined stages such as requirements specification, design, coding, testing, etc., and attempts are made to detect and fix as many errors as possible in the same phase in which they occur.

In the exploratory style, coding was considered synonymous with software development. For instance, exploratory programming style believed in developing a working system as quickly as possible and then successively modifying it until it performed satisfactorily.

In the modern software development style, coding is regarded as only a small part of the overall software development activities. There are several development activities such as design and testing which typically require much more effort than coding.

A lot of attention is being paid to requirements specification. Significant effort is now being devoted to develop a clear specification of the problem before any development activity is started.

Now there is a distinct design phase where standard design techniques are employed.

Periodic reviews are being carried out during all stages of the development process. The main objective of carrying out reviews is phase containment of errors, i.e. detect and correct errors as soon as possible. Defects are usually not detected as soon as they occur, rather they are noticed much later in the life cycle. Once a defect is detected, we have to go back to the phase where it was introduced and rework those phases - possibly change the design or change the code and so on.

Today, software testing has become very systematic and standard testing techniques are available. Testing activity has also become all encompassing in the sense that test cases are being developed right from the requirements specification stage.


There is better visibility of design and code. By visibility we mean production of good quality, consistent and standard documents during every phase. In the past, very little attention was paid to producing good quality and consistent documents. In the exploratory style, the design and test activities, even if carried out (in whatever way), were not documented satisfactorily. Today, consciously good quality documents are being developed during product development. This has made fault diagnosis and maintenance smoother.

Now, projects are first thoroughly planned. Project planning normally includes preparation of various types of estimates, resource scheduling, and development of project tracking plans. Several techniques and tools for tasks such as configuration management, cost estimation, scheduling, etc. are used for effective software project management.

Several metrics are being used to help in software project management and software quality assurance.