Gaining Clarity

Before you start writing code, it is important to gain clarity on your concept and approach (Figure 1).
Specifically, in this first part of the book, we’ll examine:

• Why you develop software — what problem you’re trying to solve and what outcome you want to achieve (1  Outcome: Why?).
• What output your software should create to deliver the most value to your users (2  Output: What?).
• How your code can generate this output, and how to get from working code to good code (3  State & Flow: How?).

Figure 1: A developer writes code, which is then executed to generate some output that is consumed by a user. Before you start writing this code, it is important to gain clarity on the why, what, and how of your solution.