essay on software programming

Essay On Software Development

Software Development has evolved immensely over the past few decades and especially in the past few years. We have seen an increase in the demand for software across all platforms. Electronic device usage is growing worldwide and every one of those devices requires software whether it has a user interface or not. Think about the transportation industry, semi-autonomous vehicles are offered by many different auto makers with more and more of them announcing their plans to automate driving each year. The software that runs this aspect of the vehicle only has a small user interface footprint but the requirement for software development perfection has exponential consequences. This is becoming the norm in our everyday lives. More and more …show more content…

Since the method was developed for manufacturing and construction projects, it made sense in these industries that a portion of the project was fixed and unchangeable after a phase completed. Imagine the construction of a road, you prep and lay down a foundation then eventually lay down the final asphalt or concrete layer. It wouldn’t make sense to build in the ability to go back and change the foundation after the top layer was set. Obviously, software engineering is very different and therefore requires a much different approach to development. Besides slow turnaround, there were many other criticisms of the waterfall method. Some included redesign, rework, and retesting due to lack of knowledge about requirements when a project began. Also, due to the extremely long lead and delivery times, requirements changed or projects were dropped altogether leaving a company with a half-built loss on the balance sheet. An industry average put the estimated time for any software project using the Waterfall approach at 3 years. This was the environment that enabled a few forward-thinking developers to meet and design a new and better approach. They met first in 2000 but it wasn’t until the winter of 2001 that they delivered their Agile framework to the software community. A manifesto was written that outlines the Agile framework

W3 Consortium

•A description of the document object model, exploring issues faced when developing for a range of platform versions and device vendors

The Waterfall Methodology By Winston Royce

The Waterfall methodology was created by Winston Royce in 1970 and is based on the idea of "...progressing linearly from conception, through requirements, design, code and test..." (Neill, 2004). One of the main assumptions about this method is that the requirements will change very little if at all and that users will not be involved in development or be providing much feedback (Neill, 2004). A really good definition given by Laplante and Neil on this methodology is, "This model of development assumes that requirements are set, stable, and fully evolved before analysis begins, because development progresses linearly through the phases from requirements through system deployment. A phase is revisited only if artifacts created in that phase fail inspection review, or test. If you run into people who dispute this argument, remind them that water doesn 't flow up a waterfall" (10).

Wells Fargo Waterfall Approach

Written off as a dying approach to software engineering I found that the Waterfall approach process was in fact alive and largely in use according to a Queue opinion article (Neill, 2004). While surveying professionals for the article in Queue, the Waterfall approach was reported to be in use by a third of the professionals that responded to the survey (Neill, 2004). I could not help but wonder if the Waterfall approach was some sort of zombie process that was back from being presumed dead, or if the method was being used for convenience purposes. Before I would be able to answer these questions for myself I would have to look into why these presumptions were made in the first place.

Essay On Software Developer

According to CareerOneStop, about ten percent of software developers either have no college degrees, or only have high school diplomas. The creative aspect generated behind computer programs are made by software developers. Some develop the virtual systems that run society’s gadgets or control networks. Other software developers make applications that enable people to perform certain tasks on a device. If someone wanted to be a software developer, they have to have expertise in computers and electronics, engineering and technology, mathematics, telecommunications, and design. They would also have to perform tasks such as developing and modifying software to meet user’s needs, making sure that the software runs correctly

Waterfall Methodology Essay

But there are some disadvantages of waterfall methodology. One major disadvantage is that developers cannot go back to the previous step once they have completed the step. If the project requirements are not satisfied initially then there might be a chance of project failure. It might also cost budget issues as well as more duration to complete the project. If developers want to make certain changes in the code of project in between then they again need to start from the beginning to write the code.

Can Stand Alone As The Sole Development Strategy

can stand alone as the sole development strategy. Verner and Cerpa (1997) observed a relationship between the size of a department and the preference to utilize a prototype. They also discovered many of the aspects of a waterfall approach that made it widely used still hold true. Developer communication and project control have long been seen as positive characteristics of the waterfall approach. The increased control is the result of the rigid, phased structure that defines a waterfall development plan. A drawback to this development strategy is the lack of feedback that we see in the scrum or agile method. This lack of feedback makes having a complete requirements essential, the lack of which can mean an unsuccessful or scrapped project.

Essay On Agile Development Manifesto

In 2001 a group of thought leaders recognized the need for common set of values and principles that represent Agile Vision, as traditional development methodology was failing too often and they came up with Agile Manifesto that emphasizes four important Agile

Essay about software engineering

Software engineering (SE) is the profession concerned with specifying, designing, developing and maintaining software applications by applying technologies and practices from computer science, project management, and other fields.

An Agile Software Application Development Essay

The top reason for adopting an Agile software application development approach is that it promotes a culture of collaboration and continuous feedback that concentrates on early delivery of superior products that meet important end user requirements. Agile software development is in use by many organizations and has been accepted not only as a method of developing software but in project management as well. This business case will outline the justification for Company “X” to move towards using the Agile development method and help guide management to evaluate and consider this option. An article related to the Agile method of software development was perused in preparation for this business case. The article examined is titled “Agility in Context” [1] (Hoda et al, 2010). This article along with my prior employment experience with Company “X” has helped provide the context for this business case.

The Role Of Visualization In Effective Data Cleaning?

After being able to be a part of a few data projects, I am a firm believer that waterfall will never go away, because it produces clean numbers and allows the data to easily be translated in visual form, therefore, I chose “The Waterfall That Won’t go Away” as my primary source of comparison for waterfall. Another reason I see the waterfall method still dominating the workspace is due to the number of different projects that reoccur. For example, I’ve experience several projects come to a close and be implemented throughout the company, but I will see a handful of old projects being returned to be modified so that it will meet the claims and coding requirements for several hospitals. Due to the continuous complexity in algorithms and software, billing codes are not always accepted in prospective delivery; resulting in retrospective recovery.

Reusable Software Development Essay

• 6 Works Cited

The quality and reliability of software today is expected to be extremely high. Software is being included in engines of automobiles, robots, x-ray machines at hospitals; it is no surprise that software is expected to operate correctly almost all the time. This reliability comes at a cost of increasing complexity. With the increase in complexity, software development teams are getting larger and maintenance is becoming more difficult. Although developers are dealing with these problems project dates are still very rigorous and projects can seem impossible to complete on time. Due to these problems, software development costs are rising which is increasing the cost of software for consumers. Without new practices to develop software

Software Development Effort And Productivity Essay

Introduction It is well known that lots of software corporations are still offering idealistic software costs, effort within rigid schedules, and complete their assignments well behind budget and schedule, or do not finish them at all(Walle and Hannay, 2009). This detail demonstrates that the need for steadfast methods to bring about software development effort and productivity are a strategic concern in software corporations. Concurrent Management of software development effort and productivity are important subjects in most software corporations (Walle and Hannay, 2009). One vital part when managing effort and productivity is the huge number of related and unidentified influencing factors termed as productivity factors. Recognising the most appropriate factors impelling project performance is vital for implementing corporate strategies by choosing and regulating suitable enhancement undertakings (Carver, Kendall, Squires and Post, 2007).

Designing A New Software Tool Essay

A new software tool, which aims to interactively discover the micro-organization of pyramidal neurons, has been developed recently. This tool is the PyramidalExplorer which makes possible the exploration of regional differences in the pyramidal cell morphology by integrating quantitative morphological information regarding the cell’s morphology with applied functional models. This tool is known for its navigation within the 3D dataset and for its unique filter and content-based retrieval operations. More than its possible contributions to the advancement of neuroanatomy, this tool is also expected to solve problems on brain diseases and to initiate improvements in the field of microanatomy.

Software Engineering And Software Development

INTRODUCTION: Software has been part of modern society for more than 50 years. The software process is the foundation for engineering software. Within the context of his book, Pressman defines “A software process as a framework for the tasks that are required to build high-quality software.” [1]. This paper introduces and discusses some of the Software methodologies and issues. METHODOLOGIES RELATED TO WEB DEVELOPMENT: In Software Engineering, a software development methodology is a division of software development work into different phases with the purpose of better planning and management. The methodologies may include pre-definition of

Software Engineering : A Part Of Everyone 's Life Essay

Software engineering has become a part of everyone’s life. People need software for various activities such as paying electricity, mobile bills through an automated systems and so on which make their work easier. Software engineering is a tedious task which involves steps such as planning, gathering requirements, designing and analysis (whether the architecture fits the requirements of the user or not), implementation (turning the design into machine executable code), testing and maintenance activities. Each step needs careful planning and execution because they involve a lot of money, time, and effort. In the same way to make their work easier, the Federal Bureau of Investigation wanted to build an automated system which provides a transition from their paper-based work to fulfill their tasks electronically. Therefore, they wanted to build a project called Sentinel. The Sentinel project had setbacks right from the start. When the request for proposal was published, only two companies came forward to take up the project which is really shocking for any organization. “The CIA’s new approach to break-down the entire project into smaller pieces and work on them incrementally did not seem difficult in the beginning, but as the time goes on they faced the real hardships[1]”. The various reasons for the failure of Sentinel Project are lack of proper scoping, no proper planning(repetitive increments in each phase and no proper estimates on time, money and prototyping which is

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Essays on programming I think about a lot

Every so often I read an essay that I end up thinking about, and citing in conversation, over and over again.

Here’s my index of all the ones of those I can remember! I’ll try to keep it up to date as I think of more.

There's a lot in here! If you'd like, I can email you one essay per week, so you have more time to digest each one:

Nelson Elhage, Computers can be understood . The attitude embodied in this essay is one of the things that has made the biggest difference to my effectiveness as an engineer:

I approach software with a deep-seated belief that computers and software systems can be understood. … In some ways, this belief feels radical today. Modern software and hardware systems contain almost unimaginable complexity amongst many distinct layers, each building atop each other. … In the face of this complexity, it’s easy to assume that there’s just too much to learn, and to adopt the mental shorthand that the systems we work with are best treated as black boxes, not to be understood in any detail. I argue against that approach. You will never understand every detail of the implementation of every level on that stack; but you can understand all of them to some level of abstraction, and any specific layer to essentially any depth necessary for any purpose.

Dan McKinley, Choose Boring Technology . When people ask me how we make technical decisions at Wave, I send them this essay. It’s probably saved me more heartbreak and regret than any other:

Let’s say every company gets about three innovation tokens. You can spend these however you want, but the supply is fixed for a long while. You might get a few more after you achieve a certain level of stability and maturity, but the general tendency is to overestimate the contents of your wallet. Clearly this model is approximate, but I think it helps. If you choose to write your website in NodeJS, you just spent one of your innovation tokens. If you choose to use MongoDB, you just spent one of your innovation tokens. If you choose to use service discovery tech that’s existed for a year or less, you just spent one of your innovation tokens. If you choose to write your own database, oh god, you’re in trouble.

Sandy Metz, The Wrong Abstraction . This essay convinced me that “don’t repeat yourself” (DRY) isn’t a good motto. It’s okay advice, but as Metz points out, if you don’t choose the right interface boundaries when DRYing up, the resulting abstraction can quickly become unmaintainable:

Time passes. A new requirement appears for which the current abstraction is almost perfect. Programmer B gets tasked to implement this requirement. Programmer B feels honor-bound to retain the existing abstraction, but since isn’t exactly the same for every case, they alter the code to take a parameter…. … Loop until code becomes incomprehensible. You appear in the story about here, and your life takes a dramatic turn for the worse.

Patrick McKenzie, Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names . When programming, it’s helpful to think in terms of “invariants,” i.e., properties that we assume will always be true. I think of this essay as the ultimate reminder that reality has no invariants :

People’s names are assigned at birth. OK, maybe not at birth, but at least pretty close to birth. Alright, alright, within a year or so of birth. Five years? You’re kidding me, right?

Thomas Ptacek, The Hiring Post . This essay inspired me to put a lot of effort into Wave’s work-sample interview, and the payoff was huge—we hired a much stronger team, much more quickly, than I expected to be able to. It’s also a good reminder that most things that most people do make no sense:

Nothing in Alex’s background offered a hint that this would happen. He had Walter White’s resume, but Heisenberg’s aptitude. None of us saw it coming. My name is Thomas Ptacek and I endorse this terrible pun. Alex was the one who nonced. A few years ago, Matasano couldn’t have hired Alex, because we relied on interviews and resumes to hire. Then we made some changes, and became a machine that spotted and recruited people like Alex: line of business .NET developers at insurance companies who pulled Rails core CVEs out of their first hour looking at the code. Sysadmins who hardware-reversed assembly firmware for phone chipsets. Epiphany: the talent is out there, but you can’t find it on a resume. Our field selects engineers using a process that is worse than reading chicken entrails. Like interviews, poultry intestine has little to tell you about whether to hire someone. But they’re a more pleasant eating experience than a lunch interview.

Gergely Orosz, The Product-Minded Engineer . I send this essay to coworkers all the time—it describes extremely well what traits will help you succeed as an engineer at a startup:

Proactive with product ideas/opinions • Interest in the business, user behavior and data on this • Curiosity and a keen interest in “why?” • Strong communicators and great relationships with non-engineers • Offering product/engineering tradeoffs upfront • Pragmatic handling of edge cases • Quick product validation cycles • End-to-end product feature ownership • Strong product instincts through repeated cycles of learning

tef, Write code that is easy to delete, not easy to extend . The Wrong Abstraction argues that reusable code, unless carefully designed, becomes unmaintainable. tef takes the logical next step: design for disposability, not maintainability. This essay gave me lots of useful mental models for evaluating software designs.

If we see ‘lines of code’ as ‘lines spent’, then when we delete lines of code, we are lowering the cost of maintenance. Instead of building re-usable software, we should try to build disposable software.

Business logic is code characterised by a never ending series of edge cases and quick and dirty hacks. This is fine. I am ok with this. Other styles like ‘game code’, or ‘founder code’ are the same thing: cutting corners to save a considerable amount of time. The reason? Sometimes it’s easier to delete one big mistake than try to delete 18 smaller interleaved mistakes. A lot of programming is exploratory, and it’s quicker to get it wrong a few times and iterate than think to get it right first time.

tef also wrote a follow-up, Repeat yourself, do more than one thing, and rewrite everything , that he thinks makes the same points more clearly—though I prefer the original because “easy to delete” is a unifying principle that made the essay hang together really well.

Joel Spolsky, The Law of Leaky Abstractions . Old, but still extremely influential—“where and how does this abstraction leak” is one of the main lenses I use to evaluate designs:

Back to TCP. Earlier for the sake of simplicity I told a little fib, and some of you have steam coming out of your ears by now because this fib is driving you crazy. I said that TCP guarantees that your message will arrive. It doesn’t, actually. If your pet snake has chewed through the network cable leading to your computer, and no IP packets can get through, then TCP can’t do anything about it and your message doesn’t arrive. If you were curt with the system administrators in your company and they punished you by plugging you into an overloaded hub, only some of your IP packets will get through, and TCP will work, but everything will be really slow. This is what I call a leaky abstraction. TCP attempts to provide a complete abstraction of an underlying unreliable network, but sometimes, the network leaks through the abstraction and you feel the things that the abstraction can’t quite protect you from. This is but one example of what I’ve dubbed the Law of Leaky Abstractions: All non-trivial abstractions, to some degree, are leaky. Abstractions fail. Sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. There’s leakage. Things go wrong. It happens all over the place when you have abstractions. Here are some examples.

Reflections on software performance by Nelson Elhage, the only author of two different essays in this list! Nelson’s ideas helped crystallize my philosophy of tool design, and contributed to my views on impatience .

It’s probably fairly intuitive that users prefer faster software, and will have a better experience performing a given task if the tools are faster rather than slower. What is perhaps less apparent is that having faster tools changes how users use a tool or perform a task. Users almost always have multiple strategies available to pursue a goal — including deciding to work on something else entirely — and they will choose to use faster tools more and more frequently. Fast tools don’t just allow users to accomplish tasks faster; they allow users to accomplish entirely new types of tasks, in entirely new ways. I’ve seen this phenomenon clearly while working on both Sorbet and Livegrep…

Brandur Leach’s series on using databases to ensure correct edge-case behavior: Building Robust Systems with ACID and Constraints , Using Atomic Transactions to Power an Idempotent API , Transactionally Staged Job Drains in Postgres , Implementing Stripe-like Idempotency Keys in Postgres .

Normally, article titles ending with “in [technology]” are a bad sign, but not so for Brandur’s. Even if you’ve never used Postgres, the examples showing how to lean on relational databases to enforce correctness will be revelatory.

I want to convince you that ACID databases are one of the most important tools in existence for ensuring maintainability and data correctness in big production systems. Lets start by digging into each of their namesake guarantees.

There’s a surprising symmetry between an HTTP request and a database’s transaction. Just like the transaction, an HTTP request is a transactional unit of work – it’s got a clear beginning, end, and result. The client generally expects a request to execute atomically and will behave as if it will (although that of course varies based on implementation). Here we’ll look at an example service to see how HTTP requests and transactions apply nicely to one another.

In APIs idempotency is a powerful concept. An idempotent endpoint is one that can be called any number of times while guaranteeing that the side effects will occur only once. In a messy world where clients and servers that may occasionally crash or have their connections drop partway through a request, it’s a huge help in making systems more robust to failure. Clients that are uncertain whether a request succeeded or failed can simply keep retrying it until they get a definitive response.

Jeff Hodges, Notes on Distributed Systems for Young Bloods . An amazing set of guardrails for doing reasonable things with distributed systems (and note that, though you might be able to get away with ignoring it for a while, any app that uses the network is a distributed system). Many points would individually qualify for this list if they were their own article—I reread it periodically and always notice new advice that I should have paid more attention to.

Distributed systems are different because they fail often • Implement backpressure throughout your system • Find ways to be partially available • Use percentiles, not averages • Learn to estimate your capacity • Feature flags are how infrastructure is rolled out • Choose id spaces wisely • Writing cached data back to persistent storage is bad • Extract services.

J.H. Saltzer, D.P. Reed and D.D. Clark, End-to-End Arguments in System Design . Another classic. The end-to-end principle has helped me make a lot of designs much simpler.

This paper presents a design principle that helps guide placement of functions among the modules of a distributed computer system. The principle, called the end-to-end argument, suggests that functions placed at low levels of a system may be redundant or of little value when compared with the cost of providing them at that low level. Examples discussed in the paper include bit error recovery, security using encryption, duplicate message suppression, recovery from system crashes, and delivery acknowledgement. Low level mechanisms to support these functions are justified only as performance enhancements.

Bret Victor, Inventing on Principle :

I’ve spent a lot of time over the years making creative tools, using creative tools, thinking about them a lot, and here’s something I’ve come to believe: Creators need an immediate connection to what they’re creating.

I can’t really excerpt any of the actual demos, which are the good part. Instead I’ll just endorse it: this talk dramatically, and productively, raised my bar for what I think programming tools (and tools in general) can be. Watch it and be amazed.

Post the essays you keep returning to in the comments!

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10x (engineer, context) pairs

What i’ve been doing instead of writing, my favorite essays of life advice.

format comments in markdown .

Quite a few of these are on my list, here’s some others that I keep returning to every so often:

• https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks
• https://medium.com/@nicolopigna/this-is-not-the-dry-you-are-looking-for-a316ed3f445f
• https://sysadvent.blogspot.com/2019/12/day-21-being-kind-to-3am-you.html
• https://jeffknupp.com/blog/2014/05/30/you-need-to-start-a-whizbang-project-immediately/

Great list! Some essays I end up returning to are:

• https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/compendium/software-structure?share_key=6fb5f711cae5a4e6
• https://caseymuratori.com/blog_0015

These are conference talks on youtube, not blog posts, but here’s a few of the ones I often end up sending to collaborators as addenda to discussions:

Don Reinertsen - Second Generation Lean Product Development Flow

Joshua Bloch

The Language of the System - Rich Hickey

Some posts:

https://speakerdeck.com/vjeux/react-css-in-js - diagnosis of problems with CSS (not because of React)

https://zachholman.com/talk/firing-people

Especially for fault-tolerant systems, “why restart helps” really opened my eyes:

• https://ferd.ca/the-zen-of-erlang.html

Oh, I forgot: http://web.mit.edu/2.75/resources/random/How%20Complex%20Systems%20Fail.pdf

Oldie but a goodie:

https://www.developerdotstar.com/mag/articles/reeves_design_main.html

+1 for that one

This is a great list. If i could make one addition it would have to be Rich Hickey’s “simple made easy”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oytL881p-nQ

I was once working with a newly formed (4 person) team on a large and complex project under a tight deadline. For a while we weren’t seeing eye to eye on many of the key decisions we made. Watching and reflecting on this talk gave us a shared aim and, perhaps even more importantly, a shared language for making choices that would reduce the complexity of our system. It is a gift that keeps on giving.

Another one that belongs on this list: https://www.kitchensoap.com/2012/10/25/on-being-a-senior-engineer/

A couple of my favorites:

• https://nedbatchelder.com/text/deleting-code.html
• https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/23/rub-a-dub-dub/

Out of the Tar Pit. https://github.com/papers-we-love/papers-we-love/blob/master/design/out-of-the-tar-pit.pdf

I’d like to nominate another of Nelson Elhage’s posts:

• https://blog.nelhage.com/2016/03/design-for-testability

This has had more direct influence on my day-to-day code writing than anything else. (Also, his other writing on testing is great.)

As another commenter mentioned conference talks, Bryan Cantrill on debugging is important—it meshes well with Nelson’s Computer can be understood . ( https://www.slideshare.net/bcantrill/debugging-microservices-in-production )

A fave of mine: Clojure: Programming with Hand Tools https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShEez0JkOFw