Software Development
We live in a world where software is a huge part of our daily life, from cars to phones to coffee makers, software plays a huge role in our modern lifestyle. Behind every fancy application, we use, be it on our cell phones, laptops or on our cars and homes, there is software in the backend that tells the application what to do. In this guide, learn more about software development, how does it work? What is that? and the methods behind it. This manual is intended for anyone who wants to learn more about software development, it is not necessary to have a technical background to follow this manual. In this guide, we will mainly focus on the important aspects of the concentrate software development, such as:
- Software development processes
- Software development life cycle
- Methods of software development
- Software developer
- Programming languages
- Differences between backend and frontend.
Software development is also known as (software design, application development, or platform development) is, in simple terms, a series of instructions or programs created to perform a task or action. According to IBM Research, “Software development refers to a set of computer science activities dedicated to the process of creating, designing, deploying, and supporting software.” Indeed, software development is a set of processes, like the Software is to be developed. Every software has a life cycle.
What is Software Development?
Software Development
Software life cycle models describe phases of the software cycle and the order in which these phases are executed. Each phase produces results that are required for the next phase of the life cycle. The goal of SDLC or Software Development Life Cycle is to produce software with the highest quality and lowest costs in the shortest possible time. There are several phases included in SDLC, it includes requirements analysis, design, implementation, testing, publishing and maintenance & support. There are six phases in every software development lifecycle, which are as follows:
- Requirements analysis: The first phase of every software development lifecycle is the collection of requirements. Do you know who will be using the system? How are you going to use it? What kind of data are entered by the users? Which data is output by the system? And other important information for the entire development is usually gathered in this phase. In this phase, information is gathered from the customer in order to develop a product based on their specification and expectations.
Once the requirements are collected, they are analyzed and examined how this data can be incorporated into system development.
After the requirements have been completed, the Software Requirement Specification document is created. Both developers and customers should review the SRS document carefully and use it for future reference.
- Design: The design phase, or as known in software development as technical design, is supervised by the development team. Typically, senior developers and software architects are responsible for the design phase. In this phase, you and the development team decide what software needs, how it will look, and the time frame for developing the software. This phase also establishes workflows in which the engineers decide what kind of databases to use in the order and create a data model. This phase will help you with the next phases of software development that you need to go through.
- Implementation / Coding: The next phase after the design phase is the implementation or coding phase. After receiving the system design documents, the work is divided into modules and programming begins. This is usually the most time-consuming phase of the software development cycle. Software developers write the code based on the system design specification document. It takes a lot of planning before writing the first line of code. In this phase, the development tasks are divided up so that the project can be broken down into individual parts. Going bit by bit gives us time to review and conduct feedback sessions to make sure development is on the right track.
- Test: We know that software development will be better if you test the software during the development process. This way, problems/bugs are found during the build and our developers can usually fix them in this phase without having to negatively influence the other phases of software development. In this phase, all types of tests are carried out, such as unit tests, system tests, acceptance tests, and integration tests. We’re taking one more step to ensure that the testing phase is complete. We are bringing in a group of users to test the product and give us feedback. User testing is important as it helps uncover issues that may not be obvious to our developers.
- Maintenance: As soon as customers start using the developed system, the real problems arise and need to be resolved from time to time. This process of taking care of the product being developed is known as maintenance.
METHODS OF SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT
To be successful in managing software development, there are a few different methods that managers or teams can use for their process. All methods are different and have their strengths and weaknesses. Here is an overview of the most commonly used software development methods.
Types of software development
Software development is one of the fastest-growing industries and the potential for a career is endless. There are different types of software development and here are some you should know:
- Back end development
- Software tools development
- API development
- Embedded Systems Development
- Security software development
- Cloud computing
- Mobile development
- Web development
- Application development
- Data sciences
TYPES OF PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES?
Software Development (Programming Languages)
There are basically two types of programming languages, low-level languages or known as assembly or and high-level languages like C #, Java, Python, etc.
- Assembly
- Procedural
- basic
- C.
- Object-oriented
- C #
- Java
- Declarative
- prolog
- SQL
- Functional
- Lisp
- Haskell
Differences between backend and frontend?
The frontend refers to the client-side, while the backend refers to the server-side of the application. Both are critical to web development, but their roles, responsibilities, and the environment in which they work are completely different.
What does a software developer do?
Software developers often work for computer companies and manufacturers. Your main job is to lay the foundations for operational systems that computer programmers work on. You will design, write, and test code for new systems and software to ensure efficiency. Software developers also run diagnostic programs and quality assurance (QA) reviews on existing projects before launching them to confirm effectiveness.
A software developer is involved in all of the processes involved in creating and designing new systems, from initial planning and setting parameters to design writing, coding, encryption, and testing. This process is usually carried out by a team of software developers, with each member performing a specific step in the process and a supervisor overseeing the entire project.
