Modern Principles of Software Development


What is the definition of software development?

Phones, televisions, automobiles, vending machines, coffee makers, even pet toys all have software-based functions these days. All of these items were developed by groups of people who banded together with the purpose of causing electrical signals to behave in a predictable manner. In a nutshell, software development refers to the entire process of bringing a software project from idea to completion.

A software deliverable's design, documentation, programming, testing, and continuing maintenance are all part of this process. These elements are combined to form a workflow pipeline, which is a set of actions that, when followed, results in high-quality software outputs. The Software Development Lifecycle is the name for this process.

There are several schools of thought in the field of software development. The following discussion is not intended to be a comprehensive guide, but rather a summary of the most often used strategies. Today, software development is usually accompanied by an agile project management methodology. During phases 3 and 4 of the Software Development Lifecycle, this method is in action.

Expectations are stated, dependencies are handled, and tasks are outlined over a regular planning period. During a sprint session, the tasks are completed and changed. These tasks are updated as they near completion throughout the sprint timeframe. Jira, a task-tracking software program, is used to keep track of the status of individual tasks within a holistic sprint perspective.

The Lifecycle of Software Development

  • The idea − Projects are developed, prioritized, and envisioned. During this stage, Confluence is an excellent tool for creating product research papers and sharing design assets.

  • Roadmap/Planning − Stakeholders have been identified, budgets have been established, and infrastructure has been requisitioned. The idea phase's design papers are divided down into actionable tasks. These task lists are managed, tracked, and organized using Jira and Trello.

  • Write code, review it, then test it − Development teams strive to provide production-ready software that satisfies user needs and feedback. CI/CD pipelines guarantee that developers have a positive experience. Bitbucket adds CI/CD pipelines and collaborative code review tools to the code review process.

  • Deployment/Release/Hosting − It's ready to release the code now that it's been authorized and merged. Deployments are as simple as pressing a button with Bitbucket's CI/CD pipelines. There will be a requirement for a home for the live production code. Consider using Amazon AWS, Google Cloud Platform, or Microsoft Azure for cloud hosting.

  • IT Assistance − Active software projects require ongoing support and maintenance. Jira Service Management is a set of sophisticated tools for capturing, triaging, and resolving customer service requests.

  • Incident Handling − Software development best practices include deprecation and end-of-life operations, such as customer communication and migration.

Software Development's Future

A few basic ideas are driving the immediate future of software development: automation, transparency, and democratization. Overall, these developments are cutting the costs of developing new projects and lowering the barrier to participation in software development for non-technical team members.

Some of the most successful enterprise software businesses have implemented the following approaches. Understanding how your team may leverage these strategies to accelerate growth can give you a leg up on the competition. These are the trends and methods that are allowing software firms to realize their next-generation product vision and delivery.

Toggling features or Flagging features

Feature flagging is a technique for allowing new code to be released in a controlled manner. Previously, teams would deploy full features to all production users as part of a routine code release. Feature flagging lowers deployment risk by providing for safe feature validation in a production environment before exposing them to all live consumers. Once a feature flag release has been successfully, privately confirmed, it may be quickly pushed out and changed in real-time.

Microservices

A Microservices architecture (MSA) framework has been embraced by many modern networked applications. MSA is a distributed network design that allows for network resiliency and horizontal growth. A microservice implementation divides an application into discrete deployments based on business requirements. Payments, authentication, and analytics are just a few examples of these business requirements.

Functional programming

There is a resurgence of forgotten and underutilized functional programming concepts from the previous century. Languages like Ocaml, Haskell, and Lisp are being rediscovered by a new generation of developers. Mistakes in language design are now being discussed. There have been discussions on whether or not Object Oriented Programming was a mistake.

Higher-quality, well-designed user-empathetic programming languages are laying the groundwork for higher-quality, well-designed user-empatheticcommercial product production, according to organizations. These higher quality services may be provided by functional languages, which include capabilities that reduce the cognitive burden of developers dealing with and maintaining a codebase. As a result, there are fewer problems and higher quality software.

The technique of establishing or disproving the correctness of algorithms in an underlying system is known as formal verification. It's similar to validating an algebraic statement in terms of mathematics. For the algorithm implementation, a formal property specification is supplied, and methods such as static analysis can be used to establish the accuracy of the implementation.

The radical concept that code may write itself originates from the idea of formal verification. Given a well-designed formal business domain type specification upfront and a well-typed language. To develop a codebase that fits the formal requirements, you can employ generative tools. These concepts are explored in languages like Idris, coq, and agda.

Continuous Delivery and Continuous Integration

Continuous integration and continuous development are two of the most prominent instances of automation's utility. CI/CD creates barriers that allow developers to send new code and features to production environments, which are then automatically deployed. Prior to the rise of CI/CD, merging code and deploying was a significantly more time-consuming procedure.

Teams would need to coordinate and plan when to merge features, as well as consider how to minimize disputes in code modifications among team members. Teams had to manually copy data between servers during deployments, and the network may fail or desync a deployment across a cluster. Version control systems, automated tests, and monitoring tools are the guardrails that make CI/CD possible.

Development based on results

Outcome-driven development (ODD) is a workflow that promotes quick and light software development. Instead of assigning tasks, ODD specifies goals and allocates ownership of those goals to a team that will be accountable for meeting and implementing them. If you've ever been to a team planning meeting where the general opinion was "why are we developing this?" then you know what I'm talking about. It's possible that outcome-driven development is the way to go.

Containerization

Containerization is a growing trend in DevOps that automates hosting and deployment tasks (the automation of developer support duties like infrastructure management). Prior to the advent of containerization, developers had no guarantee that their programs would act the same across computers. It was a dangerous and time-consuming process to migrate apps across cloud machines or hosting providers. Teams may now bundle whole system-level dependent stacks as portable containers that can be started on any computer.

Serverless Functions

The emergence of cloud-based infrastructure has made installing standard server software stacks easier. Individual code functions may now be directly uploaded and executed using this new hosting paradigm. A developer can create and publish a basic code function that accepts input and outputs results.

The serverless platform will then publish this code function as a URL that can be used to access it. The development-to-production release pipeline has been substantially simplified thanks to this new procedure.

Software Development in an Agile Environment

The agile manifesto was written by a group of software professionals who were disgruntled with the old burdensome management structure in 2001.

The 'Agile' technique is a widely used software development paradigm in today's world. Agile evolved from dissatisfaction with previous monumental techniques. The slower-moving, less forgiving sectors of physical products manufacture gave birth to methodologies like Waterfall and TQM.

Manufacturing is a far more forgiving and fluid end product than software. Agile takes use of these characteristics and offers a management technique that complements them. The development of previously described features such as CI/CD, Feature flags, and Microservices has been fueled by Agile.

The adoption of Agile development methodologies has resulted in the emergence of new software development disciplines. DevOps is a contemporary branch of software development that focuses on support and automation for non-developmental software. DevOps teams are largely responsible for assisting and improving the efficiency of software developers. DevOps teams provide technologies to automate and manage routine software development tasks such as infrastructure upkeep.

Agile has been a huge help in terms of streamlining the development process. Agile principles and culture have proven so effective that they are now being applied to other sectors of the company, such as design and product development.

Other Methodologies for Software Development

Extreme programming −Extreme programming is an offshoot of the Agile methodology. Customer satisfaction is emphasized as the guiding factor for development iteration cycles in extreme programming. Extreme programming is based on a five-step iteration process. Planning, Managing, Designing, Coding, and Testing are the rules. On the official extreme programming website, you may learn more about the rules of extreme programming.

Lean Development − Lean Software Development, often known as LSD, is a progression of lean manufacturing ideas and methods. The Toyota Production System inspired LSD. It is gaining traction in the Agile community thanks to the backing of a pro-lean subculture. Lean provides a robust conceptual framework, values, and principles, as well as best practices, which are drawn from experience, to help businesses become more agile.

Waterfall Model − The waterfall model is a development method that developed in the building and manufacturing industries. It's a highly planned procedure that keeps moving from one phase to the next to a minimum. The unreasonably costly stages of execution in physical contexts are the driving force for this limitation. When applied to software, these constraints might feel oppressive and ineffective.

How to Learn Software Development (and Why)

Learning software programming might be a terrific way to expand your employment opportunities. In a software development company, being able to recognize and debate technical software development topics may increase your toolkit.

A fundamental understanding of software development is becoming increasingly useful. Understanding how software is designed and implemented may help an individual perform more efficiently in both their personal and professional lives. Human-computer interaction is present in almost all current business procedures.

Observing or participating in a successful open source project, such as Git, is one of the finest exercises for getting started. These projects might be based on software that you currently use and appreciate. They'll include criteria for contributing, as well as open message boards for discussion and implementation. Furthermore, simply reading this text indicates that you are prepared to take the initial steps and get started!

Updated on: 25-Nov-2021

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