Software development real-world practise

Wow! Where to start?
Programming is ad varied as are businesses and people who use programming. You can take a little knowledge and produce web pages and smart time savers for people and small businesses using simple tools like VB, Access and html, CGI, etc... These are one or two-man jobs and the challenge is understanding the user's real problem then conquering the technology to solve the user's problem . Then at the other end of the spectrum, you sit in corporations, working on 100-man projects where the challenge becomes working within the human network to finally produce a product using technolgy. One thing you lose is the feeling of seeing a need and fixing it - that's gone, you are just a cog in the wheel. One thing you gain is that you graduate to bigger more complex technology using J2EE, Smalltalk, analysis and design methodologies, expensive hardware, expensive databases, etc.

I've done both. I enjoy the first more. With experience, I make more money with the second. To make money with the first, you are going to do more hours of handholding simply because the client is less experienced and you have fewer people on the "team" to help. Its good training though because you learn the entire range of skills. With the second, you make more money with less effort because you are part of a larger team and other people take care of various areas of the project. On the other hand you spend large quantities of time not having what you need because some group somewhere "hasn't finished that yet".

What else? I'll stop here and see what else surfaces.

Software design documentation boils down to two steps:

1) Standardize your design template (the types of questions you'll ask and answer during design).

This insures that your documentation is easy to read, as you have the same information in the same place for each component. It also forces you to break down your process into categories.

2) Identify the inputs, the workflow and the outputs to each component of your software.

This is basically 'how your software works.'

The development environment fits the industry - the answer to your question is going to vary. If you are in the aerospace
industry it's one thing, the paper industry - something else, if your are in the video industry - something else, whatever - every place is so different. Certainly there are some things in common, but there's more different than common.

What is common:

Nothing's as pretty as you saw in school - everything is much more complicated, much nastier, and you have to dealwith people in real situations that don't quite have realistic expectations.

sleeplessness - that's common

the pager - that's common

Whenever you know something, then you now support it - forever - that's common

The right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing - That's the most common thing of all...