What Do Software Application Developers Do?

Software application developers typically work as part of a team to design, develop, test, and distribute software and applications. The exact tasks team members are likely to perform on a given day depend a great deal on the nature of the project they are working on and the stage of development they are in. Overall, however, developers typically follow a design document to understand the nature of an application they are developing, create and alter code to develop the software, and then test that software to find and eliminate bugs and other errors. Software application developers can also continue working on software to publish new updates and patches for the application.

While a great deal of work done by software application developers involves creating computer code, there is also planning for development in many instances. This planning can be done by an entire team or by the manager or lead in charge of the team. Individual developers can work on different parts of a design document, usually focusing on specific elements of a program such as the user interface (UI) or various functionalities. Those software application developers working on the plan might further refine these ideas before ever beginning to write code.

Once the planning is done, software application developers typically begin creating the actual code for the application. This can be done using a variety of programming languages and platforms for compiling and ultimately running the application. Different team members are likely to work on different aspects of a software application, often associated with different parts of the design document. Team leaders usually oversee these different software application developers and ensure that programmers are on task and producing the work needed to complete a program.

As the development cycle for software begins to move toward completion, then some software application developers may begin performing a large number of tests on the software. Developers from different departments may focus on testing certain aspects of a program. This process includes not only finding errors and bugs within the software, but thoroughly reproducing them and documenting the nature of those errors. This then moves into cycles in which developers test to find bugs, make changes to the code to correct these bugs, and then conduct further testing to repeat the process as needed. Once software is finally complete and distributed, then software application developers can continue to work on updates and patches to support that software.