Difference Between Process and Methodology in Software Engineering

Software engineering is the process of designing, developing, testing, and maintaining software. In this article, we will understand what is the difference between a methodology and a process in software engineering but before understanding.

What is Software Process?

The software process is a set of steps or a set of activities that are used during the development of software. And if we perform all the steps accordingly then the expected result can be produced that is going to be efficient and provides value to the customer. For example, if we want to develop software successfully we should follow a set of rules or the activities such as Planning, Requirement Gathering, Design, Implementation, Testing, and Deployment. By following these steps we can ensure that the software will be developed efficiently and with high quality.

As we have discussed, the software process is a set of steps or a set of activities that are used during the development of software. A process is important because it reduces complexity, divides the big problems into a small problem, and then solve the small problems independently, another advantage is to minimize software cost, software development needs a lot of hard work with a large number of codes. By having established processes we can reduce all the things that are not necessary, so the money did not waste on unnecessary things. There are many other benefits as, can decrease development time, can handle big projects, can make projects reliable and effective.

What is Methodology?

Whenever we build software or a project we have to go through different software phases commonly known as the software development life cycle, during this process depending on the software requirement we use different approaches for the successful completion of the project and these approaches are called methodology. There are different methodologies like agile, waterfall, spiral methodology, etc.

Difference Between Software Process and Methodology

Activity	Process	Methodology
Definition	The software process is a set of steps or a set of activities that are used during the development of software.	It is a way to solve a particular problem in a structured way.
Focus	A Process consists of all the steps from the start to the completion of the project that are needed during the development.	Its focus is more on the particular phase during the development.
Flexibility	There are different types of processes available and can be used according to the requirements of the user.	The methodology is predefined so it has low scope for changes in the predefined methodology.
Example	An example of a software process is SDLC(Software Development Life cycle).	One example of methodology is agile.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q.1: What is Process and Methodology?

Answer:

The software process is a set of steps or a set of activities that are used during the development of software. Whenever we build software or a project we have to go through different software phases commonly known as the software development life cycle, during this process depending on the software requirement we use different approaches for the successful completion of the project and these approaches are called methodology.

Q.2: What is the benefit of using the Software Process?

Answer:

The software process is a set of steps or a set of activities that are used during the development of software. A process is important because it reduces complexity, divides the big problems into a small problem, and then solve the small problems independently, another advantage is to minimize software cost, software development needs a lot of hard work with a large number of codes. There are many benefits, can decrease development time, can handle big projects, and can make projects reliable and effective.

Q.3: What is the difference between Waterfall Methodology and Agile Methodology?

Answer:

The waterfall method follows the sequential approach. In the waterfall method, there are multiple phases such as Planning, Requirement Gathering, Design, Implementation, Testing, and Deployment. Each stage is important but in the basic waterfall method feedback is available and it is good for small-scale projects. Whereas Agile is a commonly used methodology that includes breaking the task into smaller parts and then solving the problem fast and efficiently, also we can take feedback so which will decrease the chances of error and developers can develop the software efficiently.