A passenger aircraft is composed of several millions individual parts and requir

Question

A passenger aircraft is composed of several millions individual parts and requires thousands of persons to assemble. A four-lane highway bridge is another example of complexity. The first version of Word for Windows, a word processor released by Microsoft in November 1989, required 55 person-years, resulting in 249,000 lines of source code and was delivered4 years late. Aircraft and highway bridges are usually delivered on time and below budget, whereas software is often not. Discuss what are, in your opinion, the differences between developing an aircraft, a bridge and a word processor, which would cause this situation? (12 points) Consider your watch (digital) as a system and set the time 2 minutes ahead -describe the use case SetTime recording all actions and reactions required Note: Your watch system shall allow you to set the hour and minutes by having 2 buttons to achieve this. (12 points)

Explanation / Answer

Hi,

The main difference between developing an aircraft, a bridge or a software is that-
When we are building an aircraft or a bridge, we are building a hardware(something that we can touch and feel and that exist in the real world). When we build such things, we first prepare the design and decide the material and components to build that thing. The decision can be made by considering certain parameters like-
i) Maximum load the bridge can carry and the maximum load it may expect.
ii) durability of the product
iii) amount of wear and tear the product will undergo over a period of time subject to its usgae.
iv) The available materials and/or components to build the product.

When we have a design ready we can be sure that the aircraft and or bridge is safe and can be deployed or implemented. Once the bridge or aircraft is ready, it can run for a long duration withput any fixes or issues.

However, this is not the case with MS word. When we build a software it need ti run on various operating system and/or platforms. Some of the components of the software may work with one OS but it may not work well with other OS. This is known as cross compatibility. When MS word was first released, it was facing issues because it was supposed to run on windows OS and as windows OS was evolving and hence some features of MS word were not working correctly with the Windows. This means each time a new Windows OS version was deployed, a new version of MS word should be deployed to fix the compatibility issues.

Moreover, the probability of errors we do while coding is very high as the number of points where error might occur are more. The errors may cause the program to stop its execution. The the developer needs to review the code and find the errors in the code in order to run it again.

Also, when we develop the code, we need to check whether a newly built module is glueing properly with existing components. This means, we need to continuosly put effort to integrate the code.

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