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Jamshid Hashimi
Jamshid Hashimi

Posted on • Originally published at Medium on

What is Software Development?

You may be reading these lines in a browser of a computer or mobile phone, in your Gmail or Outlook application or you may be reading it in beautifully designed pages that are digitally typed and designed, and presented for you and probably some of you received a Facebook notification on your phone that prompted you to read these lines. Thinking of your day to day activities, you may have opened your browser to search for jobs, to apply for scholarships, to use Skype for a business call, scrolled up and down a hundred times your Facebook feed or posted attractive (you think so) photos in your Instagram or Snapchat accounts. You may have also uploaded content to your organization’s website, used a management information system provided for your organization to generate reports or ordered Siri to play you a song.

Gmail, Outlook, Facebook, Skype, Snapchat, Google Chrome and all the other tools and applications that you use on your computer or your other digital devices are all software applications and tools that are built by software developers through a process called software development. Software development is a process that includes all that is involved between the conception of the desired software through to the final manifestation of the software, sometimes in a planned and structured process. Software development may include research, new development, prototyping, modification, reuse, re-engineering, maintenance, or any other activities that result in software products, like the ones you use every day.

Even though software can be applied to a huge variety of uses and contests, the process to develop any type of software is standard, throughout the world. The coding, the instructions given by software developers to computers through computer programming languages in the process of software development is completely logical, scientific and specific such that these languages ensure the programs do exactly what they are designed to do, for any person, in any country. Computers -- for example your laptop or mobile phone -- as their capacity allows, are there to apply all those instructions exactly as they are laid out, without getting grumpy about it, or tired or frustrated (though they do get heated sometimes, only because they get excited working for you!).

Is there any other ways you define Software Development? Please comment below.


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