How to Write a Program with the Seven Steps

Step 1: Work an Example Yourself
1. Work at least one instance of the problem
2. Difficulties
  1. The problem is ill-specified—it is not clear what you are supposed to do
  2. Lack domain knowledge—the knowledge of the particular field or discipline the problem deals with
Step 2: Write Down What You Just Did
1. Think about what you did to solve the problem, and write down the steps to solve that particular instance
2. Difficulties
  1. The difficult is thinking about exactly what you did to accomplish the problem
    1. Don´t forget small details, "easy" steps, or things that you do implicitly
Step 3: Generalize Your Steps
1. Find the pattern that allows us to solve the whole class
  1. Take particular values that we used and replace them with mathematical expressions of the parameters
  2. Find repetition—the same step repeated over and over
2. Difficulties
  1. Difficult to see the pattern, making it hard to generalize the steps.Returning to Steps 1 and 2 may help. Doing more instances of the problem will provide more information
Step 4: Test Your Algorithm
1. Test the algorithm with different values of the parameters than the ones we used to design our algorithm
2. Also test any corner cases—cases where the behavior may be different from the more general cases

Resource summary

	Created by Luiz Porto over 6 years ago