Development life cycle

The development cycle involves at least five steps:

• Identify
• Plan
• Program
• Validate
• Bugs

The first step is self-explanatory; before you develop, you must identify the problem that needs to be solved. Planning is perhaps the most crucial step in the development cycle:

Good planning will help later by decreasing the amount of code required and the number of bugs. Planning becomes even more vital during the learning process. A forensic programmer must begin to answer the following questions: how will data be ingested, what Python data types are most appropriate, are third-party libraries necessary, and how will the results be displayed to the examiner? In the beginning, just as if we were writing a term paper, it is a good idea to write, or draw, an outline of your program. As you become more proficient in Python, planning will become second nature, but initially, it is recommended to create an outline or write pseudocode.

Pseudocode is an informal way of writing code before filling in the details with actual code. Pseudocode can represent the bare bones of the program, such as defining pertinent variables and functions while describing how they will all fit together within the script's framework. Pseudocode for a function might look like this:

# open the database
  # read from the database using the sqlite3 library
  # store in variable called records
  for record in records: 
    # process database records here

After identifying and planning, the next three steps make up the largest part of the development cycle. Once your program has been sufficiently planned, it is time to start writing code! Once the code is written, break in your new program with as much test data as possible. Especially in forensics, it is critical to thoroughly test your code instead of relying on the results of one example. Without comprehensive debugging, the code can crash when it encounters something unexpected, or, even worse, it could provide the examiner with false information and lead them down the wrong path. After the code has been tested, it is time to release it and prepare for bug reports. We are not talking about insects here! Despite a programmer's best efforts, there will always be bugs in the code. Bugs have a nasty way of multiplying even as you squash one, perpetually causing the programming cycle to begin repeatedly.