software developer

A software developer is a programmer who is concerned with one or more facets of the software development process, a somewhat broader scope of computer programming. This person may contribute to the overview of the project on the application level rather than component level or individual programming tasks. Software developers are often still guided by lead programmers but also encompasses the class of freelance software developers.

Other names which are often used in the same close context are software analyst and software engineer.

With time, differences between system design, software development and programming are more apparent. Already in the current market place there can be found a segregation between programmers and developers, being that one who actually implements is not the same as the one who designs the class structure or hierarchy. Even more so that developers become systems architects, those who design the multi-leveled architecture or component interactions of a large software system.
 

Scope and Focus of Software Engineering

Software engineering is not programming, which is a distinct discipline. Software engineering is concerned with the proper application of engineering principles to the design and development of a software system. This discipline deals with identifying, defining, and realizing the required performance characteristics of the resulting software. These performance characteristics include: reliability, maintainability, availability, testability, ease-of-use, portability, etc. Software engineering addresses these performance characteristics by preparing design and technology specifications, that if implemented properly, will enable the resulting software to meet these requirements.

Software engineering is also concerned with the characteristics of the program development process. In this regard, it deals with characteristics as: cost of development, duration of development, risks in development.

Process Activities/Steps

Software Engineering processes are composed of many activities, notably the following. They are considered sequential steps in the Waterfall process, but other processes may rearrange or combine them in different ways.

Requirements Analysis
Extracting the requirements of a desired software product is the first task in creating it. While customers probably believe they know what the software is to do, it may require skill and experience in software engineering to recognize incomplete, ambiguous or contradictory requirements.
Specification
Specification is the task of precisely describing the software to be written, in a mathematically rigorous way. In practice, most successful specifications are written to understand and fine-tune applications that were already well-developed, although safety-critical software systems are often carefully specified prior to application development. Specifications are most important for external interfaces that must remain stable.
Software architecture
The architecture of a software system refers to an abstract representation of that system. Architecture is concerned with making sure the software system will meet the requirements of the product, as well as ensuring that future requirements can be addressed. The architecture step also addresses interfaces between the software system and other software products, as well as the underlying hardware or the host operating system.
Coding
Reducing a design to code may be the most obvious part of the software engineering job, but it is not necessarily the largest portion.
Testing
Testing of parts of software, especially where code by two different engineers must work together, falls to the software engineer.
Documentation
An important (and often overlooked) task is documenting the internal design of software for the purpose of future maintenance and enhancement. Documentation is most important for external interfaces.
Software Training and Support
A large percentage of software projects fail because the developers fail to realize that it doesn't matter how much time and planning a development team puts into creating software if nobody in an organization ends up using it. People are occasionally resistant to change and avoid venturing into an unfamiliar area, so as a part of the deployment phase, its very important to have training classes for the most enthusiastic software users (build excitement and confidence), shifting the training towards the neutral users intermixed with the avid supporters, and finally incorporate the rest of the organization into adopting the new software. Users will have lots of questions and software problems which leads to the next phase of software.
Maintenance
Maintaining and enhancing software to cope with newly discovered problems or new requirements can take far more time than the initial development of the software. Not only may it be necessary to add code that does not fit the original design but just determining how software works at some point after it is completed may require significant effort by a software engineer. About ⅔ of all software engineering work is maintenance, but this statistic can be misleading. A small part of that is fixing bugs. Most maintenance is extending systems to do new things, which in many ways can be considered new work. In comparison, about ⅔ of all civil engineering, architecture, and construction work is maintenance in a similar way.