SOFTWARE-DEVELOPMENT

"Students of engineering learn engineering and are rarely exposed to finance or marketing. Students of marketing learn marketing and are rarely exposed to finance or engineering. Most of us become specialists in just one area. To complicate matters, few of us meet interdisciplinary people in the workforce, so there are few roles to mimic. Yet, software product planning is critical to the development success and absolutely requires knowledge of multiple disciplines"

Software development (also known as Application Development; Software Design, Designing Software, Software Engineering, Software Application Development, Enterprise Application Development, Platform Development is the development of a software product in a planned and structured process. This software could be produced for a variety of purposes - the three most common purposes are to meet specific needs of a specific client/business, 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).

The term software development is often used to refer to the activity of computer programming, which is the process of writing and maintaining the source code, whereas the broader sense of the term includes all that is involved between the conception of the desired software through to the final manifestation of the software. Therefore, software development may include research, new development, modification, reuse, re-engineering, maintenance, or any other activities that result in software products. For larger software systems, usually developed by a team of people, some form of process is typically followed to guide the stages of production of the software.Especially the first phase in the software development process may involve many departments, including marketing, engineering, research and development and general management.

Software development methodology

A software development methodology is a framework that is used to structure, plan, and control the process of developing information systems. A wide variety of such frameworks have evolved over the years, each with its own recognized strengths and weaknesses. One system development methodology is not necessarily suitable for use by all projects. Each of the available methodologies is best suited to specific kinds of projects, based on various technical, organizational, project and team considerations.

Overview

There are several different approaches to software development, much like the various views of political parties toward governing a country. Some take a more structured, engineering-based approach to developing business solutions, whereas others may take a more incremental approach, where software evolves as it is developed piece-by-piece. Most methodologies share some combination of the following stages of software development:

* Market research

* Gathering requirements for the proposed business solution

* Analyzing the problem

* Devising a plan or design for the software-based solution

* Implementation (coding) of the software

* Testing the software

* Development

* Maintenance and bug fixing

These stages are often referred to collectively as the software development lifecycle, or SDLC. Different approaches to software development may carry out these stages in different orders, or devote more or less time to different stages. The level of detail of the documentation produced at each stage of software development may also vary. These stages may also be carried out in turn (a “waterfall” based approach), or they may be repeated over various cycles or iterations (a more "extreme" approach). The more extreme approach usually involves less time spent on planning and documentation, and more time spent on coding and development of automated tests. More “extreme” approaches also promote continuous testing throughout the development lifecycle, as well as having a working (or bug-free) product at all times. More structured or “waterfall” based approaches attempt to assess the majority of risks and develop a detailed plan for the software before implementation (coding) begins, and avoid significant design changes and re-coding in later stages of the software development lifecycle.

There are significant advantages and disadvantages to the various methodologies, and the best approach to solving a problem using software will often depend on the type of problem. If the problem is well understood and a solution can be effectively planned out ahead of time, the more "waterfall" based approach may work the best. If, on the other hand, the problem is unique (at least to the development team) and the structure of the software solution cannot be easily envisioned, then a more "extreme" incremental approach may work best. A software development process is a structure imposed on the development of a software product. Synonyms include software life cycle and software process. There are several models for such processes, each describing approaches to a variety of tasks or activities that take place during the process.

BIO-INFORMATICS

Bioinformatics is the application of statistics and computer science to the field of molecular biology.

The term bioinformatics was coined by Paulien Hogeweg in 1979 for the study of informatic processes in biotic systems. Its primary use since at least the late 1980s has been in genomics and genetics, particularly in those areas of genomics involving large-scale DNA sequencing.

Bioinformatics now entails the creation and advancement of databases, algorithms, computational and statistical techniques and theory to solve formal and practical problems arising from the management and analysis of biological data.

Over the past few decades rapid developments in genomic and other molecular research technologies and developments in information technologies have combined to produce a tremendous amount of information related to molecular biology. It is the name given to these mathematical and computing approaches used to glean understanding of biological processes.

Common activities in bioinformatics include mapping and analyzing DNA and protein sequences, aligning different DNA and protein sequences to compare them and creating and viewing 3-D models of protein structures.

The primary goal of bioinformatics is to increase the understanding of biological processes. What sets it apart from other approaches, however, is its focus on developing and applying computationally intensive techniques (e.g., pattern recognition, data mining, machine learning algorithms, and visualization) to achieve this goal. Major research efforts in the field include sequence alignment, gene finding, genome assembly, drug design, drug discovery, protein structure alignment, protein structure prediction, prediction of gene expression and protein-protein interactions, genome-wide association studies and the modeling of evolution.

EVOLUATIONARY BIOLOGY

Evolutionary biology is the study of the origin and descent of species, as well as their change over time. Informatics has assisted evolutionary biologists in several key ways; it has enabled researchers to:

* trace the evolution of a large number of organisms by measuring changes in their DNA, rather than through physical taxonomy or physiological observations alone,
* more recently, compare entire genomes, which permits the study of more complex evolutionary events, such as gene duplication, horizontal gene transfer, and the prediction of factors important in bacterial speciation,
* build complex computational models of populations to predict the outcome of the system over time
* track and share information on an increasingly large number of species and organisms

Future work endeavours to reconstruct the now more complex tree of life.The area of research within computer science that uses genetic algorithms is sometimes confused with computational evolutionary biology, but the two areas are not necessarily related.

SCOPE IN BIO-INFORMATICS IN INDIA

Bioinformatics career in is increasingly attracting the youngsters in India today. The scope of bioinformatics is in areas like database design and maintenance, sequence assembly, proteomics, clinical pharmacologist, sequence analysis, informatics developer and bio-analytics. Excellent job opportunities are available in Biotech and Pharmaceutical companies in India. Indian companies like Wipro, Reliance, Satyam, TCS and companies like Accelrys and IBM Life Sciences Pubgene, Silicon Genetics and Tessella offer good employments to the bioinformatics candidates. Due to increasing demand of bioinformatics candidates, a career in bioinformatics offer good prospects

CARRER IN BIO-INFORMATICS

The career prospects in the field has been steadily increasing with more and more use of information technology in the field of molecular biology. Job prospects are in all sectors of biotechnology, pharmaceutical and biomedical sciences, in research institutions, hospital and industry. Some of the specific career areas that fall within the scope of bioinformatics include Sequence assembly, Database design and maintenance, Sequence analysis, Proteomics (the study of protein, particularly their structures and functions), Pharmacogenomics, Pharma-cology, Clinical pharmacologist, Informatics developer, Computational chemist, Bio-analytics and Analytics etc.