Software Development Structure on PC using (Cost) Free Tools

Software has been an area of great focus in the industry lately. Quality in software products is the main goal of the relatively new Software Engineering discipline. In order to achieve a good level of quality, the software engineers must follow rigid and well-documented procedures. These procedures cover all the software development chain, starting with the requirements analysis and going through the software architecture, the design of the software, the coding, the verification, the validation and finally the release [1]. All this procedures take a considerable amount of time and personal effort from the software engineers. Therefore, it is important to have good software development tools that allow the software engineer to optimize his performance and the quality of the products being developed by him. Commercial software tools are often expensive. This paper assesses some cost-free tools, also known as “freeware tools” 1, available in the World Wide Web (Internet) 2 and shows a case study where the use of a group of these tools contributed to speed up the software development process.