Software Engineering Tools at Your Disposal
15 Dec 2021Software engineering is more than just coding. It’s about knowing the correct tools to use and knowing how to use them in any
situation. There are a lot of helpful tools out there that can make it easier for you to code. When it comes to designing a user
interface, prebuilt user interfaces, or UI’s for short, can make it easier to build a professional looking web page without having
to build it from the ground up. Sometimes designing things from scratch can be tedious and time consuming, so prebuilt UI’s such as
Semantic-ui (https://semantic-ui.com/) comes with a lot of prebuilt elements that can take out a lot of the work you would have had to do without it.
There are a lot of pre-built functions you can use as well, such as the functions defined by Underscore.js(http://underscorejs.org/#). Underscore contains a
vast library of different functions that are really helpful for manipulating lists and arrays. It has a lot of functions that do
jobs that are very commonly needed such as iterating through an array and creating an array of the values specified by a truth test.
Sure, these functions would be pretty straightforward to write for even a newbie programmer, however, writing all the functions can
become quite a hassle, and it will take up a lot of room in your project file. So, not only does using these pre-built functions make
your life easier, but it also makes your code less messy.
When you have to write a whole bunch of different functions that could have been avoided had you used something like underscore, It not
only makes your life harder, but it could make your partner’s life harder should you be working on a grough project. Having to look through
a gigantic file with a thousand lines of code is a headache, especially if it’s not your own code. If you can reduce the amount of lines
in a certain file, It would help not only yourself, but all those that may potentially have to help you by reading through your code. Thus,
an important part of software engineering is maintaining readability in your code. If your code is unreadable, you can confuse both yourself
and others while trying to debug your code. Maintaining coding standards, that is, a specific format to present your code in order to keep it
clean and organized is important for group software engineering projects.
When it comes to group projects, you must also be able to manage it. One of the most efficient strategies to complete a group project is a divide
and conquer strategy where each person in the group gets assigned a section of the project to do. Github(https://github.com/) is by far one of the best tools a
developer can use to manage group projects. Github allows you to have issue driven projects where each section of the project is put under an
issue, then each issue is assigned to someone in the group, then all the different sections can be merged, creating the full project.
Github is not only good for group project management, but also for individual project management. It allows you to go back to a previous save
point in your project just in case you mess up your project beyond repair. This is a very useful tool for developers because sometimes, you
can mess up your program and have no Idea why, and in your attempt to fix it, you make it worse. This is when github’s features come in handy
as it saves every single save point, or commits in your project so you can go back to it, rather than start from scratch. Much like video games,
you want to save often, just in case you die going forward.
If you are going into software engineering, learn about all the tools at your disposal because it makes life a lot easier.