Topic: Program Development

Class: SSS Two

Program Development

What is a Program?

A program is a set of instructions that are executed by the CPU. A program can also be defined as an organized list of instructions that when executed cause the computer to behave in a predetermined manner. Without a program, the computer is useless.

Characteristics of a Good Program

The following are characteristics of a good program:

• Accuracy: Program should be sufficiently accurate to get the desired results.
• Extensibility: This means that you design the program so that you can add and remove an element from your program without disturbing the underlying structure of the program.
• Maintainability: This is making your code easy to update.
• Efficiency: A good program should be designed to use the least amount of primary memory and the fewest devices possible.
• Generality: Design the program to be generalized and flexible, if possible.
• Portability: A good program can be moved to another environment.
• Simplicity: Program logic should be as simple and as uncomplicated as possible.
• Transferability: Plan the program to be as machine independent as possible.
• Reusability: Write code that will be able to be used in unrelated projects.
• Leanness: Leanness means making the design with no extra parts.
• Security: A good program should be designed to protect against unauthorized access, data breaches, and other malicious attacks.
• Reliability: A good program should perform consistently and correctly under varying conditions, without crashing or producing unexpected errors
• Scalability: Program should be well design so that is can handle an increasing amount of data, users, or workload without a significant degradation in performance.

Precautions in Program Development

There are certain precautions that one should take during the development of a program. These are:

• Patience: One should not rush the programming process. Although deadlines are important, they should not be at the expense of a faulty program.
• Step Following: All steps of the program should be followed religiously without skipping any step, or there will be erroneous results.
• Execution Order: The order of execution of instructions should be followed.
• Fresh Mind: One should be sufficiently fresh to work on a program, being free of any kind of fatigue.

Program Development Stages

Software (Program) development can be divided into several stages as listed below:

1. Problem Definition
2. Problem Analysis
3. Flowcharting
4. Desk Checking
5. Program Coding
6. Program Compilation
7. Testing/Debugging
8. Program Documentation

Detailed Explanation of Stages:

Problem Definition:

This is the formal definition of the task. It includes specification of inputs and outputs, processing requirements, system constraints, and error handling methods.

Problem Analysis:

This step is the process of becoming familiar with the problem that will be solved with the computer program.

Flowcharting:

A flowchart is a pictorial representation in which symbols are used to show the various operations and decisions to be followed in solving a problem. A flowchart depicts the logic involved in the problem solution and therefore, is a step-by-step sequence that the program will describe to the computer.

Desk-checking:

Desk-checking is a manual (non-computerized) technique for checking the logic of an algorithm.

Program Coding:

This is the process of transforming the program logic document into a computer language format.

Program Compilation:

A compiler is a computer program (or a set of programs) that transforms source code written in a programming language (the source language) into another computer language (the target language), with the latter often having a binary form known as object code. The process of transforming source code into object code is called compilation.

Testing and Debugging:

This stage is the discovery and correction of programming errors.

Program Documentation:

Comprehensive information on the capabilities, design details, features, and limitations of the program so that those who use and maintain it can understand it so that the program can be extended to further applications.