Overview of Software Development Environments

We can illustrate this change by observing some distinctions in the terminology. Programming environment and software development environment are often used synonymously, but here we will make a distinction between the two. By "programming environment" we mean an environment that supports only the coding phase of the software development cycle—that is, programming-in-the-small tasks such as editing and compiling. By software development environment we mean an environment that augments or automates the activities comprising the software development cycle, including programming-in-the-large tasks such as configuration management and programming-in-the-many tasks such as project and team management. We also mean an environment that supports largescale, long-term maintenance of software.