Summary of Programming Tools and Methodologies

Chapter summary

In this chapter, we looked at some of the more essential concepts that go into software development that have nothing to do with the actual coding. Even if we aren’t working on large-scale, professional projects, we should still version control our code, write tests to verify that the code does what it’s supposed to, and work iteratively.

We began by learning that version control systems are a great tool that will help us not only be able to go back in time to an earlier version of the code, but also help us share our code with other developers in our team.

Then, we saw that to verify that the code we’ve written is doing what it’s supposed to, we need to test it. In this case, we have something called unit tests and integration tests that we should perform to make sure that the application produces the correct result and that the new code doesn’t produce any side effects, which would produce an undesirable result for a code that worked successfully in a previous version.

After this, we saw that the software release lifecycle defines what steps are to be performed to make a piece of code mature enough to be released to end users. When code is ready to be released, we need to deploy it to the environment (for example, as an application server) so that the end users of this application can access it. When the code is used, we need to maintain it. Bugs will be discovered, features will need to be added or changed, and so on.

Lastly, we learned that to handle the development process, a software development team will typically use a development methodology. The methodology will describe in what order things should be done, how the team will cooperate to achieve a good result, and how to decide what will go into a software release.