Designing Software

Abstract

If you are anything like me, you impatiently started reading this book at Chapter 3, became really confused about halfway through, and decided to start at the beginning and read it all properly this time. This chapter explains the bit that most manuals leave out: how to actually turn your problem into a working program. The first stage of the software development cycle is the creation of a program design. In this chapter, I’ll demonstrate how to break down your ideas into manageable chunks, understand each problem that you are trying to solve, build up a sequence of actions, keep track of what you’ve done, and above all, how to go about the constant refinement and simplification of your ideas that will lead to an effective solution that is easy to understand. I’ll be introducing you to pseudocode, the software design language, and showing you how to turn it into Python documentation strings to create a framework around which you can grow an effective and maintainable piece of software.