What is the purpose of software development?
What is the purpose of a software developer?
I bet every programmer had this question in their head at least once in his career.
In my early years as a software developer, this question came to my mind often. I struggled to understand my purpose in the company and the programming field.
Early responses to my question were, I am here to write code, the best code I can provide, the fastest and cleanest.
But after a while, I realized that programming is not just that.
Programming includes many other things, like collaboration between colleagues, business knowledge, sharing ideas, helping to improve and implement ideas, contesting ideas, and so on.
Software development includes a lot of factors, but what can make you a good software developer?
What do you need to do?
Is this the real purpose of a softw
are developer?
In my opinion, the real purpose of a programmer is to build software in the requested form to solve a problem with minimal maintenance costs, collaborate with the team, and find solutions for problems.
What I’m trying to say is that as a software developer, you have multiple responsibilities—not just writing code.
You can write the best code for a specific issue, but your code can create another issue.
When I say issue, I don’t refer just to code issues.
Every decision taken by the whole environment, from project manager to developer results in either profit or loss.
A good idea to take time to think about the problem you are resolving, but taking too much time can produce more loss than profit. Being pragmatic with your decisions can make you a better programmer and help the business.
A programmer needs to be pragmatic?
In my opinion, pragmatism is a needed skill.
Every business is created to make a profit.
So the purpose of a programmer is to program in a manner that can provide software that can create revenue.
After all of this talk about programmer, programmer, programmer we can go and see what is the purpose of programming.
With programming we are trying to solve problems, or possible problems. But is not so simple, we try to resolve problems without creating other problems, we try to automatize processes, to make a better life for people, to entertain people, and bring a lot of helpers day by day to simplify life.
All this comes with a cost for the user and can reduce costs, from a business perspective you need to find a balance between how benefits of the software in contrast with the cost of the software before you try to create that software.
You need to be sure that your software will be sustainable and create revenue before starting it.
Here the programming team needs to expose all the costs related to maintainability and scalability in the long term, also with the cost of development, not in-depth but in big lines. The business needs to know if it can sustain the project or what decisions to take in order to make it profitable.
In some cases, we need more efficiency in software.
What I tried to say in this article is that while we can find a simple definition of software development, in reality, it’s not that simple.