Overview of the Developer s Tasks

Overview of the Developer's Tasks

A developer's tasks can be divided into the following categories (each of which is described in a later section):

• Understand the requirements and design constraints

• Design, implement, and test use cases and components

• Design, implement, and test any necessary databases

• Frequently integrate your application with the work of other developers

After the tasks have been explored, the section Developer Best Practices, later in this chapter, provides a toolbox of techniques to choose from as required by your project.

All of the developer's tasks are done iteratively, as indicated in the section Frequently Integrate Your Application with the Work of Other Developers. It is important to keep this in mind when reading this chapter. Typically, you complete some design, some implementation, some testing, come up with some good ideas which you implement, and then reverse-engineer your implementation into an improved design. For instructional purposes, we describe the thought process in a more sequential order than should be applied in practice.

Note that based on the size of your project and how formally you choose to work, you may choose to document some of the described artifacts ( especially intermediate artifacts) in an informal manner (for example, on a whiteboard).