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Understanding the Program

5 February, 2015 - 11:20

If you are working on a project as a one of many programmers, the system analyst may have created a variety of documentation items that will help you understand what the program is to do. These could include screen layouts, narrative descriptions, documentation showing the processing steps, etc. If you are not on a project and you are creating a simple program you might be given only a simple description of the purpose of the program. Understanding the purpose of a program usually involves understanding it's:

  • Inputs
  • Processing
  • Outputs

This IPO approach works very well for beginning programmers. Sometimes, it might help to visualize the programming running on the computer. You can imagine what the monitor will look like, what the user must enter on the keyboard and what processing or manipulations will be done.