The domain of computer science is pretty much branched out and therefore, there are number of professions in it. In this brief article, we look in to the duties of computers programming professionals. Coding, or in other words, program writing, is the primary responsibility of computers programming professionals. For this, there are tons of programming languages available. In addition to that, the programmers are expected to follow predefined patterns and criteria when writing their code.
Writing the source code is just not adequate to produce working software. The programmer is expected to successfully compile and link the source, so the program can work on the target platform. For this purpose, there are compilers written that converts the programming source code to binary commands. Once the program is written by a computers programming professional, he/she is expected to document the purpose of the source code and the business problem covered by the software. Apart from that, the documentation and comments (in the source code itself) created by the programmer should be adequate for someone else to understand the purpose of the code.
Once computers programming professionals write individual elements of software, then the elements need to be integrated. This is also performed by the programmer with the aid of the software architect of the project. Maintainability is one of the most significant aspects of software development. If software is not maintainable, then it is not a good software program. Therefore, the computers programming professionals are required to add maintainability to their software.
Although we mention ‘Requirements analysis’ at a later point of this article than at the beginning, this is one of the most key first steps in the software development life cycle. The rule is that a programmer requires to know the requirement for writing a software program as he/she needs to write the program in such way that it satisfies the said requirements.
Largely, software testing and hardware testing which usually use some of the best electronic test equipment like Tektronix oscilloscope is a different profession than computers programming profession. But, the programmers are required to dry-test their own programming code for obvious logical errors before the software program is given to the software quality assurance team. Then the software quality assurance team will test the software for functional and non-functional requirements specified in the requirements documents agreed by the client.
Debugging is one of the last measures attached in computers programming. Once the quality assurance team rules ‘bugs’ in the software, the computers programming professionals are required to solve the ‘bugs’. For debugging, programmer use different technologies and approaches depending on the tools used and the type of the ‘bug’. In general most of the functional and non functional bugs are caused by logical errors in the program level.
