Quality requirements
Whatever the approach to software development may be, the final program must
satisfy some fundamental properties. The following five properties are among the most
relevant:
* Efficiency/Performance: the amount of system resources a program consumes
(processor time, memory space, slow devices, network bandwidth and to some extent
even user interaction), the less the better.
* Reliability: how often the results of a program are correct. This depends on
prevention of error propagation resulting from data conversion and prevention of errors
resulting from buffer overflows, underflows and zero division.
* Robustness: how well a program anticipates situations of data type conflict and
other incompatibilities that result in run time errors and program halts. The focus is
mainly on user interaction and the handling of exceptions.
* Usability: the clarity and intuitiveness of a programs output can make or break its
success. This involves a wide range of textual and graphical elements that makes a
program easy and comfortable to use.
* Portability: the range of computer hardware and operating system platforms on
which the source code of a program can be compiled/interpreted and run. This depends
mainly on the range of platform specific compilers for the language of the source code
rather than anything having to do with the program directly.
Algorithmic complexity
The academic field and the engineering practice of computer programming are both
largely concerned with discovering and implementing the most efficient algorithms for a
given class of problem. For this purpose, algorithms are classified into orders using
so-called Big O notation, O(n), which expresses resource use, such as execution time
or memory consumption, in terms of the size of an input. Expert programmers are
familiar with a variety of well-established algorithms and their respective complexities
and use this knowledge to choose algorithms that are best suited to the circumstances.
Methodologies
The first step in most formal software development projects is requirements analysis,
followed by testing to determine value modeling, implementation, and failure
elimination (debugging). There exist a lot of differing approaches for each of those
tasks. One approach popular for requirements analysis is Use Case analysis.
Popular modeling techniques include Object-Oriented Analysis and Design (OOAD) and
Model-Driven Architecture (MDA). The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a notation
used for both OOAD and MDA.
A similar technique used for database design is Entity-Relationship Modeling (ER
Modeling).
Implementation techniques include imperative languages (object-oriented or
procedural), functional languages, and logic languages.
Measuring language usage
It is very difficult to determine what are the most popular of modern programming
languages. Some languages are very popular for particular kinds of applications (e.g.,
COBOL is still strong in the corporate data center, often on large mainframes, FORTRAN
in engineering applications, and C in embedded applications), while some languages
are regularly used to write many different kinds of applications.
Methods of measuring language popularity include: counting the number of job
advertisements that mention the language[7], the number of books teaching the
language that are sold (this overestimates the importance of newer languages), and
estimates of the number of existing lines of code written in the language (this
underestimates the number of users of business languages such as COBOL).
Debugging
A bug which was debugged in 1947.
Debugging is a very important task in the software development process, because an
erroneous program can have significant consequences for its users. Some languages are
more prone to some kinds of faults because their specification does not require
compilers to perform as much checking as other languages. Use of a static analysis tool
can help detect some possible problems.
Debugging is often done with IDEs like Visual Studio, NetBeans, and Eclipse.
Standalone debuggers like gdb are also used, and these often provide less of a visual
environment, usually using a command line.
Programming languages
Main articles: Programming language and List of programming languages
Different programming languages support different styles of programming (called
programming paradigms). The choice of language used is subject to many
considerations, such as company policy, suitability to task, availability of third-party
packages, or individual preference. Ideally, the programming language best suited for
the task at hand will be selected. Trade-offs from this ideal involve finding enough
programmers who know the language to build a team, the availability of compilers for
that language, and the efficiency with which programs written in a given language
execute.
Allen Downey, in his book How To Think Like A Computer Scientist, writes:
The details look different in different languages, but a few basic instructions appear
in just about every language: input: Get data from the keyboard, a file, or some other
device. output: Display data on the screen or send data to a file or other device. math:
Perform basic mathematical operations like addition and multiplication. conditional
execution: Check for certain conditions and execute the appropriate sequence of
statements. repetition: Perform some action repeatedly, usually with some variation.
Many computer languages provide a mechanism to call functions provided by libraries.
Provided the functions in a library follow the appropriate runtime conventions (eg,
method of passing arguments), then these functions may be written in any other
language.
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