Programme Flow Control 

Programme Flow Control –  What do you need before you start building a boat? You need a plan. You need drawings. You need an idea of what kind of boat it’s going to be and what you want it to do. If you want to sail round the world but you just bang a few planks together and hope for the best, guess who’s going to be shivering in a towel on the beach five minutes later.

So let’s think about how you want to build and manage the programme. This is known as control structured programming, in other words, you’re organising the way in which the programme runs. The more efficient and streamlined a programme is, the faster and more efficiently it will run and the easier it is to troubleshoot if something goes haywire. Ask any IT specialists what they hate most about troubleshooting and they’ll invariably clench their fists, grind their teeth and say “messy code”.

Think clean. Think tidy and organised. Design your programme to run sweetly by using flowcharts, the basic building blocks of good design. Flowcharts give you a visual picture of the sequences you’re writing so that you can plot paths, pinpoint actionable commands and follow the paths of those strings of commands to make sure each one follows on logically from the previous one or follows a logical group structure.

One of the benefits to you of having clean code is that you can group it into sections that can be replicated many times throughout a programme, rather than laboriously typing each string out every time. Knowing that the code is clean means you can slot copies of it wherever you need to, confident that it works, although of course you’ll still be testing constantly right through the design process. At least you know the syntax is correct.

Testing is crucial in the design stage so that you can spot errors before they’re written into the programme. Once you’re confident that the code is good, and you’re building the programme, testing the software is easier, you can foresee problems and adjust the structure before it crashes. An accurate coder saves everyone time and money.