Beginning Software Engineering, 2nd Edition

10Programming

A good programmer is someone who always looks both ways before crossing a one-way street.

—Doug Linder

Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live.

—Martin Golding

What You Will Learn in This Chapter:

• Tools that are useful to programmers
• How to use top-down design to turn designs into code
• Programming tips that can make code easier to debug and maintain

To many programmers, programming is the heart of software engineering. It's where fingers hit the keyboard and churn out the actual program code of the system. Without programming, there is no application. (Hopefully you've realized by now that the other stages are important, too, but many programmers still think programming is where the “real” work happens.)

As is the case with other stages of software engineering, the edges of programming are a bit blurry. Low-level design may identify the classes that a program will need, but it may not spell out every method that the classes must provide, and it might provide few details about how those methods work. That means the programming stage must still include some design work as developers figure out how to build the classes.

Similarly, the next major stage of software engineering, testing, often begins before programming is completely finished. In fact, it's best to test software early and often. It's widely known that bugs are easiest to find and fix if they're detected soon after they're created, ...