Background on Identifying problems and how the Software helped to make the World a Better place.

I intend to write this article for People who have very little/no knowledge of Software development and to provide the idea of how software changed our day-to-day lives. I know many people who feel scared/think the software is not their type or it’s very hard. My Goal, for this article, is to encourage students/people to inject the perspective that we are working to solve problems and help the world, and software is the best tool, although our work might be a 10th of a drop in ocean.

Background on problems and how the software helped:

As we humans have always thrived to make our day-to-day life simple, comfortable, easy, fast, and reliable. We started from how to make fire, grew vegetation, and developed civilization that we are proud of today’s life we lead. I don’t want to bore with known facts, but the point to mention humans choose different ways/tools to solve our problems, and computers/software is the smartest way that we developed and still using to solve problems and make the world a better place.

To give a couple of examples, existing applications we use in day-to-day life today, solved the problems once we faced and drastically improved the quality of our lives, and saves time and money.

Transportation: Uber/lyft/airbnb/instacart — A decade ago, we have cabs, taxi’s to travel between places in the same city charged by miles/hours. Problem: We have to remember the agency name, call, and book the driver at least 12 hours ahead, and if we are lucky we get the cab ride on time. Uber/Lyft identified the problem and solved it with wonderful software and whola.. everybody is happy both drivers and riders and generated millions of jobs as a gig or full time. Similarly Airbnb, Instacart, DoorDash etc.. Always, Remember we are here to solve problems that make life's better/simpler.

Shopping: Amazon/ebay/online shopping — Similar story here as well- going from store-to-store and shopping is old days. Now- buying from home and shop everything at one place and arrives within a couple of days in front of our doorstep is a revolution. Again, work made easy, simple, and comfortable.

Software: Microsoft word/computers — Storing from hard logged files to word documents, excels sheets, emails, skype, zoom, and video games etc.. you name it every other application/software solves a problem and benefit to increase our productivity.

All the above said and done, As long as we have problems in our day-to-day life we can use software to fix that (overrated :)) , So developing a software will also have problems and needs to another solution(software) to fix that problem.

Next question comes, what is the process to develop an app/software that solves the problems.

As common as it is in our normal life, It’s as simple as how we fix a dish/curry to our likes. we check if the dish tastes good and (identify) there may be more or less salt/spice/tangy/bitter . we think of appropriate solution (design) to add lemon or add sugar or more veggies depends on the identified problem. We add the necessary things we designed(implementation) and you taste ( testing) to see if your implemntation(solution) worked and then you may make little changes and test again and we finally had tasty dish as you like.

The process goes as above even for software developement:

we identify the problem and design solution, impelment solution, test the solution and mange the application and repeat the process for any software.

Professionals coined the term SDLC- Software Development Life Cycle to the exact same process we mentioned above and it became the standard procedure.

The next story focuses on SDLC and the different initial tools/languages we use.