General Software Features and Trends

Introduction

Nowadays software projects are becoming more and more complex — in size, sophistication, and technologies used. Most software products are used by a huge number of people, not only that, this software support different national languages and comes in different sizes and shapes — desktop, standard, professional, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) packages, and so on. Almost all application software products (like word processors, and ERP packages) support more than one hardware and/or software platform. For example, we have web browsers for the PC and Mac; we have database management systems that run on VMS, UNIX, Windows NT, Linux, and so on. The competition and the advancements in technology are driving software vendors to include additional functionality and new features to their products— just to stay in business. Information Technology is revolutionizing the way we live and work. Digital technology has given mankind the ability to treat information with mathematical precision, transmit it at very high accuracy, and manipulate it at will.

Features: 

The following are the trends that play a vital role in the development of software products:

Ease of use

The software systems are applications are becoming easier and easier to use. Software developers and system analysts are concerned with ensuring that the software they develop is more user-friendly than their competitor’s products. The user interfaces are more intuitive, the error messages are more descriptive, there is context-sensitive help, and there are wizards and templates to help the user when one encounters a problem.

Graphical User Interface (GUI)

Today’s software applications and products provide users with intuitive, graphical, and easy-to-use interfaces. Now the users do not have to remember the cryptic system commands or shortcut keys that were a must in the character-based era. Now almost any task can be accomplished with a mouse click. For example, in a DOS environment, to copy a file one needs to know the command for copying files, its exact syntax, and so on, whereas in the Windows environment, you just have to drag the files you want to copy from the source to destination.

Requirement for more powerful hardware

Because software vendors are incorporating more and more features into their products this software needs more powerful machines to run. They need more main memory, more secondary storage, and faster and more powerful processors. It is also not very difficult to go for new powerful computers as the price of computers is decreasing day by day.

Multi-platform capability

Today’s software applications are not developed for just one platform. Most of the software applications support multiple platforms— both hardware and software platforms. There are software applications that support hardware platforms ranging from mainframes to PCs and different software platforms like VMS, Solaris, AIX, UNIX, Windows, and so on. Database like IBM’s DB2 Universal is available for a variety of hardware and software platforms. Another important feature of today’s software applications is that they support multiple languages and multiple currencies. Many vendors are providing their applications in many languages like English, Arabic, Japanese and Chinese, and so on.

Network Capabilities

Network computers are becoming popular as they can work with minimal memory, disk storage, and processor power. These computers are connected to a network, especially the Internet. The idea behind network computers is that many users who are connected to a network don’t need all the computer power they get from a typical personal computer. Instead, they can rely on the power of the network servers. As the popularity of network computers increases, the demand for software that can run these computers are increasing and the software applications of today and tomorrow will have that capability.

Compatibility with other software

Now a day’s most software products are compatible with each other. For example, we can import HTML documents and other text documents into a Microsoft Word document. Also as newer versions of the software are released, most vendors maintain backward

compatibility i.e. compatibility with earlier versions. These two features— backward compatibility and compatibility with other products make it easier for the users, as they can choose the application they want and still use the old files they created using other

applications or using older versions of the same application.

Object Linking and Embedding

We have a mechanism to interact with other software systems. One of the methods to integrate external tools into an application is using the Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) architecture to link or embed a component from another application running on the computer. OLE is a compound document standard developed by Microsoft Corporation. It enables us to create objects with one application and then link or embed them into a second application. This embedding and linking of components enable applications to share components.

Group work capabilities

Technologies, which support collaboration, are in greater demand today than ever before. Therefore, vendors are integrating collaborating technologies into their products. Distributed workforces, information overload, and getting products to market as quickly as possible are just a few of the motivational aspects pushing collaboration technology development.

Mail Enabling

The mail enabling of an application is the process through which email is gradually replacing many of the single-purpose applications now used on personal computers. In its simplest form, a mail-enabled application is a Windows program that has a ‘Send’ command in its ‘File’ menu. For example, the Microsoft Word 2000 has a ‘Send To’ menu item in the ‘File’ menu where we can choose to send the document to a mail recipient, fax recipient, and so on.

Web Enabling

With the ever-increasing popularity of the Internet and the amount of information that is available on the net, most software application is now web-enabled. Web-enabling helps the user in many different ways. During installation, most of the applications will automatically connect to the Internet and to the vendor’s website and will register their products (earlier one had to fill in a paper form and mail or fax it to the vendor).