Question

Software Development refers to what? What fields and disciplines utilize Software Development?

Answer 1

Software development is the process of conceiving, specifying, designing, programming, documenting, testing, and bug fixing involved in creating and maintaining applications, frameworks, or other software components. Software development is a process of writing and maintaining the source code, but in a broader sense, it includes all that is involved between the conception of the desired software through to the final manifestation of the software, sometimes in a planned and structured process. Therefore, software development may include research, new development, prototyping, modification, reuse, re-engineering, maintenance, or any other activities that result in software products.

Software can be developed for a variety of purposes, the three most common being to meet specific needs of a specific client/business (the case with custom software), to meet a perceived need of some set of potential users (the case with commercial and open source software), or for personal use (e.g. a scientist may write software to automate a mundane task). Embedded software development, that is, the development of embedded software, such as used for controlling consumer products, requires the development process to be integrated with the development of the controlled physical product. System software underlies applications and the programming process itself, and is often developed separately.

Fields which utilize software development are:

• OS developer - a bunch of opportunities here, it used to be a clear choice between desktop, mobile and embedded systems, now the lines have become more blurred (i.e. you can run Android both on a phone, tablet). You would be writing kernel modules, device drivers, pretty low level stuff.
• Web developer - front-end (JS, CSS, HTML) or backend (CMS systems, web services - client, server, databases), pretty wide range of things you could do as a web dev.
• Games developer - all sort of things from video systems, particles, rendering, audio, gameplay, UI
• Mobile developer - you can specialize in building some type of apps like Android, iOS, WP
• Robotics developer- you could build the next Roomba. You need to understand some physics concepts as you are dealing with hardware and the real world (i.e. the wheels aren't turning enough, could it be too much friction from the carpet). Or even self driving cars, I think they go in this category.
• Data scientist - this is somewhat an SDE specialization, includes lots of knowledge about machine learning, AI, stats and mathematics.
• Computer vision - analysing images, labelling, medical imaging
• Distributed systems - networking, routing, threading, concurrency
• Human computer interaction - this can be a number of things but mostly VUI (voice user interface) and NUI (natural user interface) - like being able to say Xbox ON and controlling a game with Kinect, Wii.