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development

Creating software. Development is a catch-all term for the entire process of creating software, from specifying the requirement all the way through to testing and user acceptance. Programming -- actually writing software code -- is just one part of the process, which is why people prefer to be called developers rather than merely programmers. In fact, today's visual development tools make it possible to create applications without having to actually write a single line of code -- the tool creates the code automatically -- although purists insist that the results are inferior to individually crafting the code by hand.