Three Handy Software Development Tips

Worldwide smartphone shipments reached a milestone when it topped one billion units in 2013. Some of these units likely ended in the hands of your employees and partners. The business world is increasingly going mobile, which means pretty soon, you’re going to need to develop customized smartphone apps for your business as it expands. Here are three practical software development tips that can benefit your efforts.

Learn the language

Software companies try to build market share by using programming languages and tools that developers are currently using. For instance, Windows Mobile allows developers to utilize existing Visual Studio and .NET development skills and server setups to expand their applications to mobile devices.

Test, Rinse, Repeat

With the tens of thousands of lines of code that go into modern software and the inconsistencies that can sometimes occur when programs are compiled to machine language, it can be very hard to guarantee the integrity of almost any software. For organizations that rely on the quality, reliability, and security of their software, no hole can go unpatched. To achieve this, rigorous software testing is an absolute necessity.

One of the most difficult situations any piece of software can undergo is extreme load. With the ubiquity of the Internet and sheer computing capacity computers have today, situations of extreme load are no longer very uncommon. Denial-of-service attacks happen almost on a day-to-day basis, and software bottlenecks can occur when poorly optimized code is fed so much data too quickly.

Passing AST: Multiplatform

Some believe the graphical user interface (GUI) replaced the command line as the premiere computing system. While the GUI is much easier to use, thanks to its WYSIWYG system, the venerable DOS is still in use among programmers today. DOS succeeds where GUI fails, and vice versa.

This puts one of the most important requirements of passing automated software testing (AST) into perspective. Any program that can run smoothly in a GUI environment must also do the same in a non-GUI environment. In other words, the program must be able to operate in virtually any protocol. Software testers call this "backend testing."

Software Testing Pro-Tips

No matter how advanced a device or machine’s components are, it will be little more than a paperweight if the software running it is faulty or bug-filled. Hence, software testing is a must since glitches can cause expensive or potentially life-threatening problems to occur.

To catch all the kinks in a new program, be sure to take heed of these tips:

Involve Testers from the Start

Software creation should not be the sole domain of developers. To create the best programs possible, be sure to involve software testers from the get go. That way, they have a deep understanding of the code, allowing them to perform more thorough tests.

Testing Software Systems Before Market Launch

Automated software testing (AST) defines seven key requirements for military and commercial software to pass with flying colors. It may be all Greek to many, but these requirements allow today's technology to be more versatile and handle more processing power at any given time. These traits become more significant as industries grow more dependent on technology.

The first of the seven requires software to be non-intrusive to the System Under Test (SUT), a separate test that determines whether or not the software is performing its intended tasks. Think of the SUT as a fancy term for "beta-testing." Over the course of the SUT, the developers find bugs in the system to fix before releasing the finished product.

Software Testing Methods

Bugs don’t just exist in the wild—they reside in software programs, too. These glitches causes a plethora of issues, from program crashes, to lost data, or even rocket launch errors, as in the case of the European Ariane 5.

That’s why programmers have to test software before releasing or using it to catch these virtual vermin. In general, they utilize three methods to test a software in development:

Software Issues are Easy to Fix with Testing

In some ways, creating a software program is much like writing a news story. The first draft isn’t always spot-on, and even subsequent drafts still require editing. Defects found in computer programs can only be ironed out through regular bug tracking and troubleshooting, though some defects may still persist if an automated testing procedure is not performed.