Software development, law and ethics

How real software gets built: the lifecycle and feasibility, waterfall, spiral, agile, extreme programming and RAD, analysis, design, testing and version control; then the law and the ethics of what we build, ending with a robot project worked through the way the NEA asks.

Module A14A level9 lessons

Start in the simulator
  1. A14.1 The systems lifecycle and feasibility The stages from feasibility to maintenance, the three kinds of maintenance, and scoring a feasibility study.
  2. A14.2 Development methodologies Waterfall, spiral, agile, extreme programming and rapid application development: how each works, when to use it, and…
  3. A14.3 Analysis: requirements and success criteria Stakeholders, fact finding, functional and non-functional requirements, and measurable success criteria that the robot…
  4. A14.4 System design Structure charts, data flow diagrams, designing data, algorithms and the user interface, and printing a structure…
  5. A14.5 Testing strategies Black box and white box testing, alpha, beta and acceptance testing, destructive testing, and a black box test plan…
  6. A14.6 Software engineering tools and version control IDEs, CASE tools, documentation, and version control: commits, branches, merges and finding the commit that broke the…
  7. A14.7 Computing legislation The Data Protection Act 2018 and UK GDPR, the Computer Misuse Act 1990, the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988…
  8. A14.8 Moral, ethical, social and cultural issues Automated decisions, AI, surveillance, personal data at scale, censorship, piracy, the environment and accessibility,…
  9. A14.9 Project: the delivery robot A small project taken through analysis, design, implementation, testing and evaluation, the way the NEA is written up.