What your mum didn't tell you about software development

A presentation I gave to a Year 12 software programming class during my student teaching at Lynfield College.

Transcript

1. What your mum didn’t tell you about software development Chris K. Young Presentation for 12ISP August 2004
2. Software isn’t just coding  Contrary to popular belief, being good at coding doesn’t make you a successful programmer.  The skills required to become one are usually learnt by experience rather than study.
3. It’s all about the customer  The customer sponsors the development of a software product, so their input is vital.  They have functionality, performance, and/or timeframe requirements.  They often revise requirements to adapt to their changing needs.  Consequently, developers need processes to cater for changes.
4. A process, not a product  Product lifetime is typically long, often outlasting the original developers.  Therefore, software is normally maintained by more than one developer.  There are many aspects to a successful software development process. This presentation will discuss three of them.
5. Software design  Code needs to be partitioned into small, easily-understood units.  Tightly-coupled units depend on each other’s internal details, making their implementation difficult to change.  Therefore, each unit should have a single responsibility, which other units access via a complete, minimal interface.
6. Complete, minimal interfaces  “A complete interface is one that allows clients to do anything they might reasonably want to do. … A minimal interface…is one with as few functions in it as possible, one in which no two member functions have overlapping functionality.” (Meyers, 1998, p. 79)
7. Code review  Code is normally maintained by a team, which has a set of coding standards to ease maintainability.  In a code review, a team member critiques code written by another member.  This serves two purposes: to allow more team members to understand the code, and to enforce coding standards.
8. Software testing  In order to ensure correct operation of a software product, it needs thorough and regular testing.  Coders write unit tests for every unit they have, based on its interface, which are executed by an automated process.  This allows regressions to be detected and fixed swiftly.
9. More than meets the eye  There are many more aspects of running a successful software project.  As a developer, I’m not too knowledgeable about some of these, so I won’t go into them.  In conclusion, coding is only a miniscule part of software development.
10. Reference  Meyers, S. D. (1998). Effective C++ (2nd ed.). Boston, MA: Addison-Wesley.