Programming and Software Developer Tools

Programming tools or software development tools are computer programs or applications that software developers and computer programmers use to build, debug, maintain or otherwise support other programs and applications. Here are the list of common software development tools:

• A text editor that's designed specifically for editing source code of computer programs, is called source code editor which is used by programmers to write and to edit source code.
• The number one programming tool is no other than a compiler. It is a computer program or a set of programs that translates source code written in a programming language into object code.
• A debugger is a computer program that's important to programmers because it's used to test or to debug their programs and it will assists them in the detection and correction of errors in computer programs.
• A profiler refers to a tool that's used for program profiling, to investigate the memory allocation profile of an application and to identify code that causes memory problems such as memory leaks and excessive or inefficient garbage collection.
• A graphical user interface (GUI) builder simplifies or make the creation of GUIs easy, by allowing the designing user which is called a GUI designer, to arrange objects of GUI using a drag-and-drop WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor.
• A software development kit (also known as SDK or devkit,) is a programming package of software development tools includes one or more application programming interfaces (APIs) and documentation, that allows a computer programmer for the development of applications for a specific platform.

Software Development Process with Models

A software development process, also known as a software development life-cycle (SDLC), is a set of steps that a software program goes through when developed. These are the activities and steps of this process that software developers often does:

• Requirements analysis in systems engineering and software engineering (SE), is the process of reviewing a business' processes to determine the business needs and functional requirements that a system must meet.
• In systems engineering and software development, functional specification is the documentation that describes in non-technical terms and illustrations how the requested behavior of an engineering system should work.
• The term software architecture of a computer program or software system is the structure or structures of system that aids in the understanding of how the system will behave.
• Software construction is the detailed creation of programs, processes and information used to perform various tasks within the building of a structure of meaningful software through a combination of coding, verification, unit testing, integration testing and debugging. It's one of the software engineering disciplines.
• Software design is about designing the individual modules or components. What responsibilities, functions, of module and of class are? What can it do, what's not and what design patterns can be used? It is very similar to systems design.
• Software testing is an investigation about the quality of the software product or service under test, to detect differences between given input and expected output.
• Debugging is a methodical process of identifying the number of errors such as bugs or defects, from a computer program or software to be fixed.
• Software deployment is all of the activities that get a software system ready for market. In other words, it is the process of making a computer program available for use.
• Software maintenance in software engineering is the activity of modifying a software product after delivery, in order to correct faults, to improve performance or other attributes.

Software Development Process Models

Software development models or software process models are the standardised formats or systems for planning, organising and running a development project. On the following writing below, you will see some common software process models.

Waterfall Model

The waterfall model is a traditional engineering approach applied to software engineering. The activities of the software development process represented in this model are display below.

Requirements⤵
Design⤵
Implementation⤵
Verification⤵
Maintenance

The waterfall model shows steps of a software development process, where developers are to follow these phases in order:

1. Software requirements specification (SRS) is a comprehensive description of the intended purpose and environment for software system under development, or it can also be requirements analysis.

What is Software (Application) Development?

Software development (also known as application development) is a broad term for the work involved in developing software. It is the development of a software product, such as a video game or an application like Notepad (software). In our weblog, we are talking all about software development for desktop computer such PCs and laptops, and not for web, nor for mobile application development. So, if we talk about a software developer who does application development, we are talking about a programmer that can develop a video game, application software and a computer program for desktop!

Welcome to Software Development Weblog!

In literal, a “software developer for desktop” is a computer programmer that developing an application software and even developing for operating system (OS). “Dev for Desktop” that's came from those words, is a weblog of a desktop developer, where our contributor(s) occasionally share or stock their knowledge about software development for PCs and laptops, like the samples of their computer programs and macros, and about software design, debugging and programming tools such as Microsoft Visual Studio Express for Desktop, and more! Anyway, the abbreviation word "Dev" on the title “Dev for Desktop” of our blog can still be referred to "development" or "develop".