.. _software_tools:

Software development tools fundamentals
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Writing software is hard. There are lots of ways that code might not do exactly what you want, or might have bugs or other issues. For some people it's a part time activity, but for many people it's a full time job that they're paid for, and that customers pay a lot of money for. It thus shouldn't be surprising that there are lots of tools that have been created to help with writing software. 

Fundamentally, code is a usually a piece of text that you can edit in many different programs. However we strongly recommend using dedicated tools that have been made for writing code. These contain lots of functions (and we're only really going to scratch the surface) for helping to ensure you write high quality code, and to help you debug your code when things go wrong.

This section provides a brief walk though of some of the most common software development tools. There are quite a few sub-topics here. The aim isn't necessarily for you to be an expert on all of these by the end of this course. 

For each sub-topic we'll give some information on the extent to which we're going to use it in this course, and so the extent to which you need to know it (for the exam and similar). The other sub-topics are more to give you a starting point for if you do want to go deeper in your own time. 

.. toctree::
   :maxdepth: 1
   :hidden:

   software_development_tools/ide
   software_development_tools/comments
   software_development_tools/docstrings
   software_development_tools/documentation_tools
   software_development_tools/static_code_analysis
   software_development_tools/debugger
   software_development_tools/profiler
   software_development_tools/version_control
   software_development_tools/environment_control
   software_development_tools/automated_testing
   software_development_tools/continuous_integration
   software_development_tools/formatters
   software_development_tools/code_reviews
   software_development_tools/buddy_programming
   software_development_tools/libraries
   software_development_tools/licensing
   software_development_tools/pseudocode
   software_development_tools/ai_tools