What qualities should software development programmers possess

Programmers are a technical work and play an important role in the development of IT, from the establishment of underlying hardware communication protocols, to the processing of the data transmission layer, to the construction of operating systems, to the construction of the database platform and the establishment of various data marketing platforms on the application layer, programmers play an important role in it and have made great contributions to the development of the IT industry.

There are many coders in China, but the Chinese software industry, especially the network application development, has a wide misunderstanding. It is difficult to form a large-scale software development force and product capabilities, not only far from the United States, compared with India. These problems are not due to the IQ and hard work of Chinese programmers, nor to the degree of investment in development by the country or the people, but to a large extent, there are some technical and program development, misunderstanding of the concept of project design leads to insufficient productization capability in the software industry and lack of R & D capabilities for large-scale and large-scale reusable systems. It can be said that the misunderstanding has changed, it is an important task to solve the limitations brought by the small workshop model and the individual Hero Model in the software industry.

There are many children in China who are 18, 9 or years old. They have also written a lot of code through self-study. Some of their code is very beautiful, some technical details are quite outstanding, and they are also very diligent, however, they lack the ability to understand the system and the program as a whole due to incorrect understandings and opinions. These people and a friend on the Internet spoke very well, actually, they are just coding fans and are not qualified as programmers at all. But as far as I know, many small network companies' ctos are coding fans with scary wages, the end of a project is usually scary.

I. Basic Qualities of qualified programmers 

As a truly qualified programmer, or a programmer who can truly complete some code work, it should have some qualities.

1. team spirit and collaboration

Taking it as a basic quality is not unimportant. On the contrary, this is the most basic and important foundation that programmers should possess. The high-level programmers are talking about being a hero, and the power of any individual is limited. Even a genius like Linus needs to create a miracle by forming a strong team, those who write core for Linux all over the world cannot imagine the lack of collaboration spirit. The Lone Ranger can make some small softwares to make money, but once it enters the R & D team of some major systems, it will enter the commercial and productized development tasks, people who lack such qualities will be completely unqualified.

2 document habits

A high-level programmer never writes a document, but it must be a cool child. A good document is a very important part of the formal R & D process. As a code programmer, it is normal to write technical documents for 30% of the work time, and as a Senior Programmer and system analyst, this proportion is much higher.

If there is no document, a software system lacks vitality. In the future, troubleshooting, upgrading, and re-use of modules will cause a lot of trouble.

3 standardized and standardized coding habits

As a rule of some well-known foreign software companies, code variable naming, code annotation formats, and even the length of nested rows and empty row numbers between functions are clearly defined, good writing habits not only help code porting and error correction, but also help different technical personnel to collaborate.

Some coding fans complain that code written by high-level programmers is never understood by others. Such complaints can only prove that they are not worthy of self-proclaimed programmers. The Code has good readability and is a basic quality requirement for programmers.
Looking at the establishment of Linux, there is no standardized and standardized code habits, and global R & D collaboration is absolutely unimaginable.

 4. Requirement understanding

Programmers need to understand the needs of a module. Many children write programs only focus on one functional requirement. They attribute all performance indicators to hardware, operating systems, and development environments, while ignoring the performance considerations of the Code itself, some people once said that writing an ad exchange program is very simple, this kind of person never knows how the performance indicators are achieved in the case of millions or even tens of millions of visits. For such a programmer, you give him a deep blue system, he is also unable to make too many chain and access capabilities. Stability, access support, and security are all important in performance requirement indicators. As a programmer, we need to evaluate the environment of this module in system operation, the load pressure to be subjected and the possibility of various potential dangers and malicious attacks. In this regard, it may take at least two to three years of project R & D and tracking experience for a mature programmer.

5. reusability and modular Thinking Ability

I often hear such complaints from programmers who have been writing programs for several years and become skilled workers. Every day, I repeatedly write code without any new ideas. This is actually the biggest waste of Chinese software talents, some repetitive work has become the main work of skilled programmers, which can be completely avoided.

In reusability design, modular thinking means that programmers should think more about each function module or function, rather than simply completing the current task, can this module be detached from this system? Can it be modified in other systems and application environments simply? # Benzene right? No repetitive development work. If a software development organization and working group can take these issues into account in every R & D process, programmers will not delay too much time in repetitive work, more time and energy will be invested in innovative code work.

Some good program module code, even written in 1970s, can be well applied to some systems as function modules. What I see now is, many small companies tend to rewrite all their code as soon as software is upgraded or improved. Most repetitive work wastes time and effort.

6 testing habits 

As for the development of commercialization and regularization, full-time test engineers are indispensable, but it does not mean that programmers with specialized test engineers can not perform self-testing; as a project, software R & D is very important. The earlier the problem is discovered, the lower the cost of solution, after each sub-module is complete, perform a serious test to discover and solve some potential problems as early as possible, this guarantees the maximum efficiency and reliability of the overall system construction.

In practice, two aspects need to be considered for testing. On the one hand, testing of normal calls is to check whether the program can complete basic functions under normal calls. This is the most basic test responsibility, unfortunately, this is the only test task in many companies, but it is actually far behind. The second is the test of abnormal calls, such as the stability test under high load, testing of potential abnormal input by the user, testing of the module's impact in the case of Local faults of the overall system, and stable testing of modules when abnormal requests are frequently sent to block resources. Of course, not programmers need to perform such a complete test on each piece of code, but programmers must be aware of their position in the overall project and various performance requirements, conduct relevant tests and discover and solve problems as soon as possible. Of course, this requires the requirement understanding ability mentioned above.

7. Ability to learn and summarize

Programmers are easy to get rid of and fall behind in their careers, because a technology may be disruptive in just three or two years. If programmers want to live up, they must keep following up on new technologies, learn new skills.

Good at learning. For any profession, it is an essential motive force for advancing. For programmers, this requirement is even higher.

But they also need to find the right learning target. Some small coding fans also relish their learning ability. They will learn ASP, PHP, and JSP later, they use this as a show-off capital, blindly chasing superficial things and terminologies, as network programs do not understand communication and transmission protocols, and as applications do not understand interrupt vector processing, such a technician, no matter how many so-called new languages are mastered, will never improve the quality.

Being good at summarization is also a manifestation of learning ability. Every time you complete a R & D task and a piece of code, you should track the application status and user feedback of the program, and summarize it at any time, find your own shortcomings so that a programmer can grow up gradually.

A programmer who does not have growth is recommended not to use it even if he is a good player, because he will arrive immediately when he is out of date.

Those who have all of the above qualities should be qualified programmers. Please note that none of the above qualities are determined by IQ or can be learned from some university textbooks, it only requires the programmer's understanding of his work and is a matter of consciousness.2. qualities that senior programmers should possess 

As a Senior Programmer, as a system analyst, that is, the designer of a program project, in addition to all the above qualities, the following qualities are also required:

 1. Requirement analysis capability

Programmers can complete qualified code by understanding the requirements. However, for the organization and managers of R & D projects, they must not only understand the customer requirements, but also develop their own requirements more often, why?

In general, the R & D task may be a requirement from the customer or from the marketing and marketing departments. At this time, what they see for the R & D department is not a complete requirement, generally, this requirement is only functional or more formal and may obtain a complete user view. However, this is not enough because the customer has many non-technical factors, they may have difficulty proposing complete and clear, or professional performance requirements, but for project organizers and planners, he must be able to clearly understand the existence of these needs and make appropriate suggestions when completing the requirement analysis report. At the same time, it must be complete and clear in the Design Manual, so that programmers do not lose these coding rules.

The program designer must correctly understand the environment where the user needs are located and analyze the requirements accordingly. For example, the same software is released by ASP leasing and by license, performance requirements may be different. The former emphasizes better support and stability, while the latter may emphasize the simplicity of universality and installation on various platforms.

 2. project design methods and process processing capabilities

Programmers must be able to master at least two or three project design methods (such as top-to-bottom design methods, such as quick prototyping ), you can select an appropriate design method based on your project requirements and resources.

Improper selection of design methods will delay the R & D cycle, waste of R & D resources, and even affect the R & D effect.

A programmer also needs to design and process flowcharts. He needs to create a data flow chart to establish a data dictionary. He needs to process a logical flow chart to form an overall system processing flow.

A system with problematic processes, even if the code is more beautiful and each module is more refined, will not become a good system. Of course, to do a good job of Process Analysis and select a good project design method, you must have sufficient skills in requirement analysis.

3. Reusable Design and modular decomposition capabilities

This seems to be an old-fashioned re-discussion. Isn't the problem already explained in the basic quality?

As a programmer engaged in module tasks, he needs to consider the reusability of specific functional modules he faces. As a system analyst, he has to deal with a lot of complicated problems, the overall system should be divided into many reusable functional modules and functions according to a modular analysis capability, and an independent design requirement should be formed for each module. For example, in automobile production, each automobile was first installed independently, and each component was customized, but later it was different, an automobile factory began to produce automobiles through pipelines, and independent components began to be reusable. In the future, standardization became a general trend, with different models, brands and even Auto Parts of different manufacturers can also be easily updated and upgraded. At this time, the efficiency of auto production is maximized. The same is true for Software Engineering. In a mature software industry, different components in some related projects and systems can be replaced with one another. For example, many of Microsoft's desktop software, many operation modules (such as opening files and saving files) are the same set of functional modules that are reused. These interfaces are provided to desktop application developers through some class libraries for convenient mounting, this is an obvious evidence of the reusable module design.

A large and complex application system is divided into some relatively independent and highly reusable modules that can only rely on a few parameters to complete data contact combinations, it is the most important task for senior programmers and system analysts. A proper project design method and a clear flowchart are important to achieve this goal.

4. Overall project evaluation capability

As a system designer, you must be able to get a clear understanding of the entire project, such as whether the company's resource allocation is reasonable and in place, for example, whether the project schedule can maximize the efficiency will not be completed on schedule. Evaluate the overall workload of the project and the workload of each module, evaluate the resources required by the project, and evaluate the difficulties that the project may encounter. It requires a lot of experience, in other words, this is a kind of realm that can be achieved through continuous summarization. Some leaders in Software System Design in the West are very old, such as 4, 50, or even older. They are far less active in coding than young people, but in terms of project evaluation, their decades of experience are the most important and valuable wealth. The lack of such a generation of programmers in China is not the lack of programmers of that age, but the programmers of that age are basically made by research units, not from professional product software R & D, they have no experience in product-based R & D. This is also impossible.

5. team organization and management capabilities

To complete a project, the team must work together. As a project designer or R & D supervisor, the team should be able to maximize the overall strength of the team. Due to its professional nature, Technical Management, it is not the same as general personnel management, because some technical indicators and factors are designed here.

The first is the quantification of work. Without quantification, it is difficult to achieve a suitable performance appraisal. Program quantification is not a simple calculation of the number of lines of code, therefore, technical management personnel must be able to assess the complexity and workload of a module.

The second is the adjustment of the team collaboration model. Generally, the program development collaboration is divided into groups. The group has the primary programmer and the democratic mode, based on the gap in the ability level between programmers and the needs of project R & D, select an appropriate team-up method and closely combine duties and permissions with the work tasks of members, in this way, the team formation efficiency can be maximized.

A person with a high level of Code may not be able to become a qualified project R & D Director. The lack of such capabilities is often overlooked.

In summary, we can see that, as the person in charge of R & D, a project designer, the qualities and capabilities required are not the ability to write program code. Of course, in general, when a programmer reaches this quality through continuous summarization, his coding capability is quite simple, but pay attention to the causal relationship, A high-level project designer is already a very good programmer in code writing, but not a programmer with excellent code generation can be competent in project design, this is not a question of IQ or textbook. It is also because when a programmer accumulates experience and gradually upgrades, He does not realize what needs to be considered, there is no conscious understanding of the project organization and reuse design, no regular document habits and summary habits, and no change in these, our qualified project designers are still very lacking.

In addition, to prevent bored people from being honest with me, this article aims at commercial software projects and engineering projects, programming experts from scientific research institutions, such as algorithm experts, they work to study subjects rather than directly complete commercial software (of course, they eventually become commercial products, for example, Microsoft Research Institute's research subjects ), therefore, the quality they emphasize may be something else. These people (experts) cannot be said to be programmers and cannot be measured by the standards of programmers.

 

3. Design Process of software project R & D

Finally, what is the design process of a software project R & D? Take the standard design method as an example (but I like the quick prototyping method ).

The first step is market research. The combination of technology and market can reflect the greatest value.

The second step is requirement analysis. At this stage, three things are required: User View, data dictionary, and user operation manual.
The user view is a page style that can be seen by the software user (including end users and management users). There are a lot of operational procedures and conditions.

A data dictionary is a collection of data dictionaries that specify and organize data logical relationships. After the data dictionary is completed, more than half of the database design is completed.

The User Manual specifies the instructions for the operation process.

Note that user operation procedures and user views are determined by requirements. Therefore, you should complete these steps before the software design, which provides constraints and guidelines for program development, it is a pity that many companies do not do this. The cause and effect are reversed and the order is not divided. The development work and actual needs are often separated.

In addition to the above work, I think that as a project designer, we should provide a complete description of the project's performance requirements, because performance requirements can only be understood by technical personnel, this requires that technical experts and demanders (customers or marketing departments of the company) have real communication and understanding.

The third step is the outline design. The system function modules are preliminarily divided and reasonable R & D processes and resource requirements are given. As a rapid prototype design method, you can enter the coding stage after completing the outline design. This method is usually used because the R & D tasks involved are in a new field, the Technical Director was unable to provide a clear detailed design specification at the first time, but it does not mean that the detailed design specification is not important. In fact, the Rapid Prototyping Method summarizes the evaluation results and lessons learned after the prototype code is completed, we also need to re-design the detailed steps.

The fourth step is detailed design, which is an important level to test the design thinking of technical experts. The detailed design instructions should adopt the most 'clean' method (black box structure) for specific modules) provided to the coders to maximize the overall modularization of the system. A good detailed design instruction can minimize the complexity of coding. In fact, strictly speaking, the detailed design instruction documents should provide the definition of each parameter of each function in detail, from Requirement Analysis to outline design to completion of detailed design instruction documents, A software project is half done. In other words, when a large software system completes half of the work, it has not yet started a line of code.

Programmers who write software simply understand it as code, and then make mistakes from the root.

The fifth step is coding. In the standardized R & D process, the coding process will not exceed 1/2 in the entire project process. Generally, at 1/3 of the time, the so-called sharpening of the Code is good, and the design process is complete, the encoding efficiency will be greatly improved. During encoding, the Progress coordination and collaboration between different modules are the most important thing. Maybe a problem with a small module can affect the overall progress, so many programmers are forced to stop their work and wait. This problem has occurred in many R & D processes. Communication during coding and emergency solutions are very important. For programmers, bugs always exist and you must always face this problem. The well-known Microsoft, was there a time when no patch was released for three consecutive months? Never!

The sixth step is testing. There are many types of tests:

• The testing implementers can be divided into internal tests and external tests.
• According to the test scope, it can be divided into module test and overall joint debugging.
• The test conditions can be divided into normal operation test and exception test.
• According to the test input range, it can be divided into full coverage test and sample test.

The above is easy to understand and will not be explained.

In short, testing is also a very important step in project R & D. For a large software, external testing from three months to one year is normal, because there will always be unpredictable problems.

After the test is completed, the acceptance is completed, and some final help documents are completed. The overall project will come to an end. Of course, you will not be able to upgrade or repair the project in the future, we need to keep track of the operation status of the software and continuously repair and upgrade the software until it is completely eliminated.

Writing these steps is not easy, because to be honest, I have a software engineering book at hand. In college, this is a required course for computer science, however, I know that many programmers have always been keen on the category of "30 days proficient in VC". Some of them, like me, have been from guerrilla groups and have never studied this major, some other useful things have been handed back to the teacher after the school scores have been accumulated.

The Internet is also very impetuous, and some coding fans are clamoring for audio and video. In fact, real technical experts seldom post posts on the Internet. For example, if I do not know the depth of the world, it is actually not really a master, I just don't get used to this kind of technology. I have to stand up and talk about the misunderstanding and nonsense of programmers. I also hope that coding fans who are addicted to some mistakes can think about it seriously, after all, those smart minds are far from realizing their value.