What is Software Development?
Software development is the mechanism by which programmers create computer programs. The Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) is a framework for developing applications that follow technological needs and consumer requirements. It consists of many stages. The SDLC establishes an international standard that software developers can use to enhance and create their programs. It provides a well-defined framework for software developers to pursue in the production, maintenance, and design of premium quality software. The aim of the software development process is to create high-quality software on time and within budget.
How is Software Development used?
Zippia reviewed thousands of resumes to understand how software development is used in different jobs. Explore the list of common job responsibilities related to software development below:
- Acted as liaison between software development company and organization to solve database issues regarding TIMSS application.
- Oversee and ensures compliance of the application development team with MCSO s established software development life-cycle (SDLC) methodology.
- Manage the software development, delivery and deployment process for all production maintenance and minor enhancements to stores.
- Led software development activities in support of the Directorate of Intelligence and the Directorate of Operations.
- Worked to ensure awareness and training on software development standards, policies and procedures.
- Project was INPO's first foray into Agile Scrum software development methodology.
Are Software Development skills in demand?
Yes, software development skills are in demand today. Currently, 64,817 job openings list software development skills as a requirement. The job descriptions that most frequently include software development skills are application services manager, software engineering supervisor, and senior applications scientist.
How hard is it to learn Software Development?
Based on the average complexity level of the jobs that use software development the most: application services manager, software engineering supervisor, and senior applications scientist. The complexity level of these jobs is challenging.
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What jobs can you get with Software Development skills?
You can get a job as a application services manager, software engineering supervisor, and senior applications scientist with software development skills. After analyzing resumes and job postings, we identified these as the most common job titles for candidates with software development skills.
Application Services Manager
Job description:
The job of an application services manager is to provide and coordinate the management and implementation of an organization's application services. The duties and responsibilities typically include managing and evaluating the performance of supplier partners, overseeing the quality assurance team, and managing and participating in the planning, validation, and system integration of telecommunication-based products. In addition, you will be responsible for selecting personnel to expand the development, QA, and analysis teams. As an application services manager, you are also responsible for overseeing infrastructure management, web hosting, and helpdesk services.
- QA
- Infrastructure
- Software Development
- Portfolio
- Project Management
- Service Delivery
Software Engineering Supervisor
- Software Development
- C++
- Java
- Linux
- Architecture
- Software Applications
Senior Applications Scientist
Job description:
A senior applications scientist imports and exports data as well as managing user interface security. They must identify issues in their company's database system and resolve them. They are also responsible for designing equipment to automate database systems.
- Software Development
- Data Collection
- Next-Generation Sequencing
- Data Analysis
- Customer Support
- Technical Support
Software Director
- Software Development
- CRM
- Java
- Cloud
- Product Management
- Lifecycle Management
Senior Software Manager
Job description:
A senior software manager leads a testing team. They are responsible for counseling junior staff, managing resources, conducting software testing, and ensuring quality standards are met. This position requires someone who is resourceful and dynamic. They must also hold an advanced degree.
- Software Development
- Java
- Cycle Management
- Cloud
- Project Management
- Product Development
Software Development Specialist
- Software Development
- Java
- Windows
- SQL Server
- Application Development
- C
Information Systems Project Manager
Job description:
An information systems project manager is responsible for designing and developing system solutions according to business requirements and client specifications. Information systems project managers direct the technology staff in creating system strategies and ensuring that the outputs meet the quality standards, budget limitations, and required deadlines. They also identify opportunities to improve existing servers to maximize the staff's efficiency and productivity for business operations. An information systems project manager must have excellent communication and technical skills to maintain the safety and security of the networks and enhance the deliverable structures.
- Project Management
- Project Scope
- Software Development
- Systems Project
- HIPAA
- SharePoint
Computer Software Engineer
Job description:
A computer software engineer designs, develops, and maintains computer systems and software using their knowledge of computer programming languages, engineering principles, and computer operating systems. As a computer software engineer, your duties will vary depending on your specialization but typically include reviewing and analyzing the client's needs and requirements, designing, developing, and testing the software application to ensure those needs are met, and creating algorithms to instruct the computer what to do. You are also expected to provide software upgrades recommendations for existing applications or systems.
- Python
- Software Development
- Java
- Linux
- Object Oriented Programming
- MATLAB
Software Engineering Specialist
Job description:
A software engineering specialist designs and develops software engineering components. Moreover, they evaluate technical architecture and framework. They conduct tests on software and carry out any updates that are needed. Strong teamwork and communication skills are necessary for this position.
- Java
- Software Development
- Python
- Windows
- API
- C
Director Of Applications Engineering
- Application Engineering
- Cloud
- Software Development
- Java
- Infrastructure
- Technical Support
Software Support Manager
Job description:
A software support manager updates software, oversees a team, and ensures risk assessment activities are completed. They also create progress reports and manage documentation for their team. Ultimately, they manage, install, restore and debug software.
- Software Support
- Software Development
- Technical Support
- Customer Support
- Database
- SQL Server
Software Testing Manager
Job description:
A software testing manager ensures software products are high quality. They design tests, manage testing resources, and gather testing data. They work with a team to conduct testing procedures. They are also responsible for writing reports.
- Software Development
- C++
- Test Automation
- Java
- Development Process
- Project Management
Project Engineer/Software Engineer
- Software Development
- Java
- Project Management
- Python
- JavaScript
- Linux
Designation-Senior Software Engineer
- Software Development
- Python
- Java
- Architecture
- Linux
- API
Software Release Manager
- Software Releases
- Release Management
- Software Development
- Release Process
- QA
- Management Process
Software Development Engineer
Job description:
A software development engineer is responsible for designing and developing software systems and applications based on clients' specifications and business needs. Software development engineers manage operating systems and analyze network codes to maintain the compatibility of the software applications and control systems. They also run diagnostic tests for every software structure to ensure smooth navigations and perform immediate troubleshooting for inconsistencies. A software development engineer must have a strong command of programming languages, as well as technological processes and analytical skills.
- Java
- Software Development
- AWS
- Python
- Web Services
- Object Oriented Programming
How much can you earn with Software Development skills?
You can earn up to $133,433 a year with software development skills if you become a application services manager, the highest-paying job that requires software development skills. Software engineering supervisors can earn the second-highest salary among jobs that use Python, $120,581 a year.
| Job title | Average salary | Hourly rate |
|---|---|---|
| Application Services Manager | $133,433 | $64 |
| Software Engineering Supervisor | $120,581 | $58 |
| Senior Applications Scientist | $105,538 | $51 |
| Software Director | $150,380 | $72 |
| Software Project Leader | $109,474 | $53 |
Companies using Software Development in 2026
The top companies that look for employees with software development skills are Oracle, Guidehouse, and U.S. Department of the Treasury. In the millions of job postings we reviewed, these companies mention software development skills most frequently.
| Rank | Company | % of all skills | Job openings |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Oracle | 21% | 46,703 |
| 2 | Guidehouse | 11% | 3,505 |
| 3 | U.S. Department of the Treasury | 9% | 19 |
| 4 | Intel | 8% | 651 |
| 5 | Deloitte | 7% | 24,317 |
Departments using Software Development
| Department | Average salary |
|---|---|
| Engineering | $103,800 |
20 courses for Software Development skills
1. Agile Software Development
Learn best practices for using the Agile methodology to build better products faster and more efficiently...
2. Software Development Practices
As you prepare to become a professional mobile developer, you need to have a basic understanding of other industry standard software development practices. In this course, you will explore some of those processes and best practices in software development such as application lifecycle, infrastructure, testing, Agile/scrum development, how projects are estimated and tracked, as well as specialized tools...
3. Software Development Lifecycle
This Specialization is designed for people who are new to software engineering. It's also for those who have already developed software, but wish to gain a deeper understanding of the underlying context and theory of software development practices.\n\nAt the end of this Specialization, we expect learners to be able to:\n\n1.) Build high-quality and secure software using SDLC methodologies such as agile, lean, and traditional/waterfall.\n\n2.) Analyze a software development team's SDLC methodology and make recommendations for improvements.\n\n3.) Compare and contrast software development methodologies with respect to environmental, organizational, and product constraints...
4. IBM Full Stack Software Developer
Prepare for a career in the high-growth field of software development. In this program, you’ll learn in-demand skills and tools used by professionals for front-end, back-end, and cloud native application development to get job-ready in less than 4 months, with no prior experience needed.\n\nFull stack refers to the end-to-end computer system application, including the front end and back end coding. This Professional Certificate covers development for both of these scenarios. Cloud native development refers to developing a program designed to work on cloud architecture. The flexibility and adaptability that full stack and cloud native developers provide make them highly sought after in this digital world.\n\nYou’ll learn how to build, deploy, test, run, and manage full stack cloud native applications. Technologies covered includes Cloud foundations, GitHub, Node.js, React, CI/CD, Containers, Docker, Kubernetes, OpenShift, Istio, Databases, NoSQL, Django ORM, Bootstrap, Application Security, Microservices, Serverless computing, and more.\n\nAfter completing the program you will have developed several applications using front-end and back-end technologies and deployed them on a cloud platform using Cloud Native methodologies. You will publish these projects through your GitHub repository to share your portfolio with your peers and prospective employers.\n\nThis program is ACE® recommended—when you complete, you can earn up to 18 college credits...
5. Mastering Software Development in R
R is a programming language and a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics, widely used by data analysts, data scientists and statisticians. This Specialization covers R software development for building data science tools. As the field of data science evolves, it has become clear that software development skills are essential for producing and scaling useful data science results and products.\n\nThis Specialization will give you rigorous training in the R language, including the skills for handling complex data, building R packages, and developing custom data visualizations. You’ll be introduced to indispensable R libraries for data manipulation, like tidyverse, and data visualization and graphics, like ggplot2. You’ll learn modern software development practices to build tools that are highly reusable, modular, and suitable for use in a team-based environment or a community of developers.\n\nThis Specialization is designed to serve both data analysts, who may want to gain more familiarity with hands-on, fundamental software skills for their everyday work, as well as data mining experts and data scientists, who may want to use R to scale their developing and programming skills, and further their careers as data science experts...
6. Full Stack Software Developer Assessment
This is the final course in the Full Stack Professional Certificate. It will test your knowledge and the skills you’ve acquired so far. This course contains the graded final examination covering content from nine of the eleven courses in the certificate. You will be assessed on topics such as core cloud computing concepts; languages such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Python; frameworks such as Node.js and React; and backend technologies such as Docker, Kubernetes, OpenShift, SQL, Django, and Serverless...
7. Open Source Software Development Methods
In this course, we will define what open source software is, we will go over the history of open source software and what benefits it has provided to the world’s technology infrastructure over the decades. The course aims to teach you how to work in open source projects productively and gain a lot of benefits from it, and really understand what the advantages are. You will learn about collaboration best practices, and how to encourage diversity in open source projects. We will discuss the different licensing models that are available, as this will help you decide what the best license is for your project. We will talk about methods that are commonly used, such as Continuous Integration, and use of GitHub and other hosting providers as a central meeting place for open source projects, and we will provide some examples of successful open source projects...
8. Software Architecture for Developers
20 years ago I graduated with a first class software engineering degree. Since then I've worked at every stage of the software lifecycle but I've always had a particular interest in software architecture. If you have a software related background and you're interested in becoming a software architect, this course is definitely for you. Erik N says: The course provided a good overview of the topic for which I am interested, namely, software architecture. The content gave me some good ideas, encouragement and new avenues to explore. Sami S says: Good starting point to Software Architecture, at least to me who has 20+ years of software developer background. Jose V says: It's a good introductory course, very digestible and serves the purpose. Balint E says: It's a good basic introduction to the field. In this course I'll teach you what software architecture is and why we need it. I'll also explain the architecture design process and introduce you to useful patterns, frameworks and standards, which you can refer to and reuse. Becoming a software architect can be both fulfilling and lucrative, so I want to help you achieve this. I now know exactly what's involve and that's what I'll teach you in this course. Even if you're unsure about software architecture and whether you want to become involved in it, I even have a lecture dedicated to allaying any fears you may have. This course consists mainly of video, slides and some fun quizzes. It should only take you a couple of hours to complete, but it'll be a couple of hours very well spent. Thanks for taking an interest in this software architecture course and I look forward to you being my student...
9. Improving software development productivity
What will be in the course:Personal experience;How I structured the work in my team;What my team and I use;What are the alternatives to my tools;Which helped speed up development.What this course will not include:A huge amount of theory;Calculations that prove how to design;Imposing opinions and proving that problems need to be solved only this way and nothing else.As a result, this course will be useful not only for the technical leader of the development group, but also for managers of different levels, developers and testers.The topics of the lessons that will be discussed in this course are shown on the slide:Introductory lesson;Team and roles in it;Technical task;Work planning;Task management systems;Architecture;Version control systems, version accounting;Codestyle;Description of the code;Automatic generation of documentation;Testing;Bug life cycle, Bug tracker;Automatic tests;Automatic machines and scripts;Instructions;Summing up and my results.For each topic, there will be an explanation of how this innovation in the development process will help increase efficiency.By efficiency, I mean the following measured parameters:The number of mechanical errors will decrease;Development time will be reduced;The error search time will decrease;The time to attract a new developer will decrease;The accuracy of the development forecast and adherence to plans is increased.And not measurable, which will also get better:It will become easier to hand over the product to the customer;Developers' interest will increase....
10. Software Development Lifecycle & Methodologies
Everything a business person or a technical recruiter needs to know about the waterfall, Agile, Kanban, Scrum, product backlog, Scrum roles, events, and artifacts. Are you a recruiter or a team leader? This course is right for you! You will learn how software development works straight from the source: a CTO of a fast-growing startup...
11. Software Design as an Element of the Software Development Lifecycle
This course talks about software development lifecycles a description/prescription for how we write software. Design is a step in this life cycle, and the course explores the implications of this. Design has a role in the life cycle; it is always there, regardless of the kind of life cycle we’re talking about. Why is that? Why was design considered as a step in this life cycle?...
12. Requirements Gathering for Secure Software Development
In Software Requirements Elicitation for Secure Software Development, we're going to discuss the overall software requirements process as it applies in waterfall, spiral, and agile models. You'll learn about each of these processes and your goals as a software requirements analyst. This is not an easy task! Who do you talk to, when, and what kind of knowledge are you trying to obtain, in any software life cycle? How do you handle obstacles as you go? These are the questions we will focus on answering in this specialization...
13. Cortex-M Software Development Fundamentals
This course delves into software development topics such as working with Arm C/C++ compilers and Arm debug tools to optimize your software, whether it's for performance or code size. This course also looks more closely at the Common Microcontroller Software Interface Standard and how it helps ensure that software targeted at Cortex-M devices can be written using a consistent approach...
14. Mastering Software Development in R Capstone
R Programming Capstone...
15. Software Development Processes (SDLC Models)
Are you intimidated by the software development process details? Well, most people are. However, we will dismantle it for you. This course, which is carefully organized to help students to learn about Software Development Processes easily. This course will help students explore the Software Development Processes (i. e methodologies) that are very fundamentals behind the software development and the methodologies that you hear in the market. It is very critical for all IT professionals (Management Staff, Software Architects, Programmers, Testers, Database Developers, System Administrators, and Network Administrators) to possess a clear understanding of these processes. Build the much needed strong foundation by learning these software development processes: Classic ModelWaterfall ModelV-ModelIterative ModelSpiral ModelRational Unified Process Model (RUP). Agile FundamentalsLearning these methodologies helps students to communicate with high confidence with a noticeable difference at work...
16. Kanban for Software Development Teams
With growing volatility in business environment, software development process has to be responsive enough to ensure that it enables the business agility rather than becoming a bottle neck. The fast adaption of agile based processes shows that software development groups are responding to the need of business. Most of the recent surveys show growing adaption of Kanban processes and in this program you will learn how to apply Kanban for solving your software development problems. This program not only introduces the kanban and lean software development development but provide detailed insight to implement kanban practices for improving your development process. This program gets into the details of kanban principles and see how they can be applied to software development process. The program provide implementable tips for planning and monitoring software development work using kanban. This program is approved for 4 Category A PDUs from PMI and 4 Category B SEUs from Scrum Alliance. Happy Learning! To access the additional material on Project Management and agile like chapter study guides, additional chapter test, simulated test, Podcast, PMP exam tips, please visit iZenBridge homepage...
17. Fundamentals Of Agile Software Development
Fundamentals Of Agile Software Development. This gives all required basic knowledge on agile software development. This is a good starting point or a quick refresher on Agile. Agile Fundamentals, Agile Manifesto and Principles, Overview of Agile Approaches, Frameworks. This course explains the fundamentals of Agile Software Development. This training is designed to provide some basic information on agile software development, a discussion on agile manifesto and principles and an overview of different Agile approaches. This course is for anyone who want to learn or expand their knowledge on Agile Software Development. Anyone associated with, planning to get involved in or interested in learning more about Agile software development can use this course. This course is complied with a subset of lessons from our scrum training, i. e. Agile & Scrum Training and Agile & Scrum: Interview Preparation with Questions, Answers****************************************************Updated as per the latest Scrum Guide. We have updated the course content as per the changes made in the latest version of the scrum Guide(TM)*************************************************** Topics covered as part of this course are... Agile Software DevelopmentAgile Manifesto and PrinciplesAgile Methodologies Scrum Kanban Extreme Programming(XP)This course has some references taken from the Agile Manifesto and principles behind the Agile Manifesto. This course is neither endorsed by nor affiliated with Scrum org. This course uses content from the Scrum Guide. All the content related to Scrum Guide is taken from scrumguides org and is under the Attribution ShareAlike license of Creative Commons...
18. Estimates in Agile software development
In this course, you'll learn to do great time estimates for Agile software projects. We'll focus on Agile methodology and more specifically on the Scrum framework. I included also some techniques from traditional project management - the Waterfall methodology - and also a section about estimates in Kanban, another popular Agile framework...
19. Open Source Software Development, Linux and Git
The Open Source Software Development, Linux and Git Specialization will give you a strong foundation for working comfortably and productively in open source development communities. By completing the Specialization, you’ll have a better understanding of the Linux environment, as well as methods and tools required to successfully use it, and you’ll know how to use Git, the distributed version control system.\n\nUpon completion of this Specialization, you will receive a certificate from Coursera as well as a digital badge from The Linux Foundation recognizing your proficiency in open source software development, Linux environment and Git. Use your verified digital badge to promote your achievement online, and access job insights related to your new skills...
20. Software Developer Career Guide and Interview Preparation
Software engineering professionals are in high demand around the world, and the trend shows no sign of slowing. There are lots of great jobs available, but lots of great candidates too. How can you get the edge in such a competitive field? This course will prepare you to enter the job market as a great candidate for a software engineering position. It provides practical techniques for creating essential job-seeking materials such as a resume and a portfolio, as well as auxiliary tools like a cover letter and an elevator pitch. You will learn how to find and assess prospective job positions, apply to them, and lay the groundwork for interviewing. The course doesn’t stop there, however. You will also get inside tips and steps you can use to perform professionally and effectively at interviews. You will learn how to approach a code challenge and get to practice completing them. Additionally, it provides information about the regular functions and tasks of software engineers, as well as the opportunities of the profession and some options for career development. You will get guidance from a number of experts in the software industry through the course. They will discuss their own career paths and talk about what they have learned about networking, interviewing, solving coding problems, and fielding other questions you may encounter as a candidate. Let seasoned software development professionals share their experience to help you get ahead and land the job you want. This course will prepare learners for roles with a variety of titles, including Software Engineer, Software Developer, Application Developer, Full Stack Developer, Front-End Developer, Back-End Developer, DevOps Engineer, and Mobile App Developer...