How do people become professional in programming? Most of the
people follow the traditional way of going through software engineering or
computer science schools, some accidently become programmers due to their
qualities, many other starts as a hobby and found themselves programmers.
The Real Meaning of professional
and their Qualities
What qualities does a professional programmer hold? Are you
consider yourself as a professional? Some people define professional as money
maker from the skills, but true professionals must have the set of qualities to
represent a real software development company. These basic
qualities are discussed briefly below as these effect the professionals in
programming in some ways.
Trustworthiness: This concept of trustworthiness is
definitely applies in multiple methods for programmers. Are you trustworthy
with job to perform without someone inspecting you? Are you trusted body to
respect privacy of clients data or non-disclosure agreement? And as like any
professional body you must be trusted to simply do perfect job.
Teamwork: Teamwork is genuinely an essential
quality to cooperate with team members. You have to make trust on your team and
work for mutual advantage rather than your own. Sometimes it would be necessary
to enlarge your team circle by including management and client in it. And as a
leadership you should earn respect from others and meaningful what to do with
it. Recognize the expertise of your team and utilize them excellently. As a professional you must be aware of the
whole project not just your own little tasks.
Communication: A critical part of the
communication is to respect your working team, clients and listen carefully to
them. Teamwork is not possible without effective communication. Communication
is important for clients specifications and feedback, it also helps to make
timely and effective meetings.
Updating Skills: Stay aware about what is going on
in the industry, it assists you to keep update your skills. Such information is
necessary to know about as current methodologies like eXtreme programming, libraries
and tools that might support your project, refactoring tools, standards, file
formats, protocols, what platforms your potential clients are using and should
you learn cross platform development.
Minimizing Risks: You should adopt the best practices along with
healthy common sense to reduce risks. Professional programmers track the known
bugs and take care of any change that proposes to make. Be aware to make changes
in the source code to avoid risk. As a professional do enough testing although
there may be separate team of testers to do it. Another commonly overlooked
risk is to keep your code simple & well styled. Another critical point is
to write modular code to effectively adapt it for changing needs.
Accountability: Judge yourself
and make sure that your software is reliable, the client and you truly
understand the specifications and requirements. A professional programmer must
document their work related to past and current bugs, progress, problems, legal
issues and more.
You can observe the large gap between coding
and a professional programmer. So a professional web development firm, it is
their responsibility to conduct sessions and meetings to learn these qualities.
So I wish the emerging software programmers and professionals in all respected
fields must know and adopt these qualities to proudly be known as Professional.
