Software developers have their own lingo, which can make it hard to understand exactly what they are saying or asking for when you speak with them. After 5 years or so of Savvy and 15 years of marriage, I’m starting to get it, but Ben our co founder and my other half still seems to speak another language half the time. This week I thought I’d introduce you to the 5 most popular words used by software developers. This will help you better understand it when Ben posts on one of our facebook communities! Here are the five most commonly used terms that we hear around the breakfast table, so you can speak geek too!
Use cases
Great for figuring out when a customer might use your product or service. What are use cases? Basically, how someone might use something. If you’re building an app that helps people find local restaurants, one of your use cases could be: When I want to eat somewhere new, I open my app and search nearby restaurants. You can then create tasks based on these scenarios—so if you were to create an app like that you could include search filters that help users narrow down their options according to things like price range, cuisine type, etc.
Scenarios
This is a technique from game design that involves putting yourself in your user’s shoes, imagining how they would interact with your product. By being able to better empathize with your target audience, you can better determine their pain points and figure out ways to design around them. In addition, when you do come up with solutions to these problems, it will be much easier for users to learn how to use them because they already understand how it works. For example, if you were designing the app above, you might ask: What if I forget my password? What if I want to change my location? What if I want to add friends?
Scalable
If you are discussing if something is scalable you are basically talking about if it can grow. Whether that means it’s more efficient or faster as you add resources to handle increasing loads of traffic, or if it can support more users and handle more data as your business expands. At Savvy we love scalable solutions because they help us plan for the future and and allow us to better focus on new functionality and new plans.
Microservices
This is a well-known term among software development circles, but it’s not exactly a word. Microservices refers to small services (usually hosted on a separate server) that work together as part of a larger app. Here at Savvy in 2021 we split the software up into over 200 microservices, we knew this would allow us to work faster and more efficiently and put us in a position where we could grow.
Agile development
To agile developers, Agile development is a philosophy of building applications. This philosophy says that all planning for development must be flexible and responsive to change, as it will almost certainly change over time. Software teams may use Agile to develop individual features, or use scrum or Kanban techniques to track their progress from sprint to sprint. This is how our Savvy devs work and why we send out a Savvy Sprint Newsletter every 2 weeks at the end of the sprint! Sign up to our newsletter right from our website! https://savvypetspa.com/
