Important Concepts of Software Engineering

12 May 2021

There are many important concepts in software engineering that are worth learning by programmers. Although some programmers may not need to use software engineering in their careers, the concepts in software engineering can be applied to other types of fields. Some concept example comes from software engineering, Development Environments, Agile Project Management, and Design Patterns. There are more important concepts in software engineering such as Coding Standards, Open Source Software Development, and Ethics in Software Engineering, etc. These concepts are very helpful to programmers’ careers.

Every programmer has different preferences for the development environment, general are called integrated development environment (IDE). Integrated development environment usually come with a text code editor that helps developers easily write software code. It should some awesome features like syntax highlighting, automatic completion of specific programming languages, and check whether there are errors in the code being written (Could use coding standards to check errors too). Some Integrated development include compiler, and debugger. If you want to try an integrated development environment, IntelliJ IDEA will be a good choice. IDE allows developers to quickly and easy to writing code for applications, so it is ridiculous for programmers to write their code using text files (.txt).

Here is the syntax highlighting example in IntelliJ IDEA:

For developers, it is very important to understand agile project management, because users requirements for a program functionality will keep to change. Agile project management satisfies customer’s needs by continuously delivering good software. Developers should always consider future updates of the program during the coding process, one of the reason is to prevent lava flow anti-patterns. For a longer project, it is easy to encounter lava flow anti-patterns, these anti-patterns will create invalid code in the program, no one knows how it works. This will increase the difficulty of future maintenance and function implementation. If developers understand agile project management, it will ensure that user requirements are always the core of the development, and avoid or reduce unnecessary workload.

A good developer can reuse code, make it easier for others to understand, and ensure code reliability, the best way to make the code meet these conditions is to use design patterns. Design pattern is the summary experience of many software developers in software development. A design pattern is a code pattern that can be used repeatedly. Using it reasonably can help programmers solve many problems perfectly in the project. Design patterns are not only used in software engineering. Many places can also use design patterns to inspire idea and solve various problems. For example, we can use an observer pattern on the relationship between the stock market and stockholders, merchants and consumers, etc. More information about design patterns.

For programmers, software engineering is a very important lesson, because the concepts are very useful such as Development Environments, Agile Project Management, and Design Patterns, etc. Most concepts not only useful in software engineering, but also can be applied to different types of fields. For example, syntax highlighting in IDE, avoid unnecessary work and always force on the requirements, and pattern to develop a program. The concepts in software engineering are important to all programmers.