1. Btec National - Principles of Software Development 1 Principles of Software Design and Development More On Choosing a Language

2. Btec National - Principles of Software Development 2 Aims Further discussion into choosing a language

3. Btec National - Principles of Software Development 3 Choosing a language There are a number of factors that must be considered when choosing a language. –Organisational policy –Suitability in terms of features –Availability of skilled staff –Reliability –Development and maintenance costs –Expandability

4. Btec National - Principles of Software Development 4 Organisational policy Some companies have an organisational policy as to what computers and software can be used. –For example they may only use Microsoft products therefore restricted to MS programming environments

5. Btec National - Principles of Software Development 5 Suitability in terms of features The questions of suitability that need to be asked are: –What platform does the program need to work on i.e. hardware / operating system –Does the programming environment have the necessary features to carryout the tasks?

6. Btec National - Principles of Software Development 6 Availability of skilled staff –The developers that are employed within the company may be only skilled within a particular language therefore this language maybe the natural choice.

7. Btec National - Principles of Software Development 7 Reliability –Some programming languages have features that are built in to it to make programs more reliable i.e. debug etc

8. Btec National - Principles of Software Development 8 Development and maintenance costs –The cost of developing and maintaining programs is an important consideration when embarking on a software development project.

9. Btec National - Principles of Software Development 9 Expandability –Some languages expand or scale better than others and have features which support large systems, for example, OOP – (Manages complexities by using objects) or PHP (Hypertext Pre-processor) to enable developers to create dynamic content that interacts with databases to support a very large number of users.

10. Btec National - Principles of Software Development 10 Conclusion Discussed further into choosing a language