It's your first programming assignment, now what?

<i>If the program is automating a manual process then you should try--or petition for the right to try performing that process yourself so that you can become what the program is supposed to become. At the very least you should spend time watching people do things the old way, talk to them, ask questions, let them show you pictures of their kids, buy them drinks, get them drunk and provoke them into talking shop.</i><p>This is great advice! Programming is the "how" to accomplish a "what". Many of us don't spend enough time on the "what" to do the best job we can on the "how".<p>OP provides more recipes than theories. Great post!

Good stuff. This would apply not only to beginners though. I know lots of programmers who have worked for years that have either forgotten or never learned this stuff.<p>EDIT: ...or just don't care.

I expected this to be for freshmen in college. I liked it anyway.

Depending on the size of the project, step 7 can (and should) easily be the most time and labor intensive part of development. By all rights, this step ought to be called Design, and may well generate the documentation and a plan for testing of some kind.<p>UML becomes <i>very important</i> if your project generates its code from it, as quite a few companies do. This means you may not be able to start coding at all until the design is in some state of finality.

I hate to be a cynic, but your first assignment will be to make whatever it is work. As this is your first real programming gig you will probably be given a hopeless assignment with really bad or zero infrastructure to build upon. Lacking development infrastructure or even fellow developers to work with, you will become a pawn in company politics you are totally unaware of.<p>My advice is : bite that bullet. Work like a demon and spend your evenings building the infrastructure needed to produce a working piece of code. Spend your day time hours building code that is just good enough to demo. Talk to people and get feedback, but avoid giving your immediate superior the idea that you're going behind his/her back.<p>Working like this blows, but do it for half a year to a year and suddenly you're an experienced developer.<p>Now move to a different location.<p>(If you're lucky enough to land your first real-world assignment in an environment where there are experienced seniors to consult and you have an existing build and test procedure, I would give different advice.)