The art of problem-solving in code
A three-step guide to developing a problem-solving approach
Problem-solving is always an important part of a programmer’s life. If you are a software developer, machine learning engineer, or data scientist and deal with programming and software products, then you must understand what problem-solving is and how to approach solving any particular problem.
Why problem-solving matters?
Having a problem-solving mindset can be beneficial in many ways. It can help you clear coding interview problems, solve issues in your projects, or collaborate on open-source projects with a greater understanding of the problem.
Problem-solving isn’t only about solving small problems for interviews; it is also helpful in building bigger websites that consist of large amounts of code, which is constructed by taking one step at a time.
Getting better at solving problems helps you to enhance your critical thinking and improve your decision-making ability.
Importance of problem-solving
Learning to solve problems is important because we as developers encounter software programs every day. Without the ability to approach a particular problem, one ends up writing a large amount of code that makes little sense and wastes a lot of time.
So, the next time you solve any problem, first try to understand it. Understanding the problem involves carefully reading the question.
Think about what the problem is saying; analyze the problem statement. Break down the entire problem into smaller subproblems and then focus on the first one.
Then, you can implement it in your desired programming language. By doing so, you will already know how to implement it in coding. All that is left to do is to apply a few lines of code.
The three-way approach to solving problems.
Generally, problem-solving consists of three ways:
- Understanding the problem
- Planning
- Implementation
Now, we will step-by-step implement a programming problem to understand how to actually solve it.
Step 1: Understanding the problem
Problem statement: “Find the maximum number in a list.”
Let’s take a look at what the problem is saying. It states that we need to find the maximum number in a list from the given numbers. We are provided with the list of numbers and we will write the program that will return the highest number in the list.
Step 2: Planning
Now that we understand the problem, let’s plan how to solve it. To do so, we need to declare a list consisting of a few random numbers. To find the maximum number in the list, we need to iterate over every number and find the one that is the highest.
Step 3: Implementation
The first thing we need to do is define a list of numbers. To do this, create a variable and assign it to a list of numbers.
numbers = [21, 34, 5, 42, 65, 30]We define a list that contains six random numbers. Now, we need to declare a new variable named max_num. This variable will store the maximum number found in the list so far. We will set this variable to the first number in the list, number[0].
numbers = [21, 34, 5, 42, 65, 30]
max_num = numbers[0]We have created a list of numbers and stored the maximum number in a new variable, max_num. Now, we need to loop through each number to check them all.
numbers = [21, 34, 5, 42, 65, 30]
max_num = numbers[0]
for num in numbers:
print(num)
#output: 21 34 5 42 65 30This will iterate through each number and give all the numbers in the output, but we need only the largest number in the list.
To do this, we need to compare each number in the list with the current value of the maximum number. We will perform this operation within for loops.
When the current number is larger than the maximum number, we will update the maximum number to be equal to the current number.
The following code is required for this operation.
numbers = [21, 34, 5, 42, 65, 30]
max_num = numbers[0]
for num in numbers:
if num > max_num:
max_num = numThe if statement will compare the current number with the maximum number, as we explained earlier, and update the max_num accordingly.
Finally, we will print out the maximum number from the list.
numbers = [21, 34, 5, 42, 65, 30]
max_num = numbers[0]
for num in numbers:
if num > max_num:
max_num = num
print(max_num)
#output: 65This will print out the maximum number which is 65.
In theory, this program takes a list of numbers and prints the maximum number as output. For this, it declares a variable and initializes it to the first number. Then, it runs a for loop which iterates through all the numbers in the list and finds the maximum number by comparing each number in the list with the current number one by one.
We have now completed all three steps of solving a problem. You can use this approach for any other problem; the longer the problem, the more subproblems it requires to solve it.
Conclusion
In this article, we explore what problem-solving is, why it is important in software development, and how we can approach solving any given problem. Then, we go through a programming problem and break it down into smaller sub-problems, implementing it in Python based on our understanding of the problem.
Note that there are many ways to solve a problem. The example we used is to demonstrate how we can approach coding problems by analyzing them and solving them step by step.
I hope this article helps you to understand problem-solving and its importance in Software development.
