Hello, and welcome! My name is Ben Lambert, and I’ll be your instructor for this course. 

A bit about me, I started developing software before the modern cloud existed. And during that time I’ve been fortunate enough to work on a wide variety of projects. Projects spanning programming languages, operating systems, and cloud platforms. 

Through this course, I’m hoping to share some of the lessons I’ve learned during that time. Should you want to ask me a specific question, you can do that with the contact details on screen. 

You can also reach support by using the email address: support@cloudacademy.com. And one of our cloud experts will reply.

The goal for this course is to introduce new software developers to the concepts of software testing, debugging, and logging. These concepts are common to most programming languages, making this foundational knowledge. 

Testing software is how developers prove that software is behaving as expected. Debugging code is part of the normal development process. And logging is one of the key ways that we can gain insight into how our software is behaving in other environments.

After learning about these concepts you’ll be ready to start exploring how to use these concepts with your preferred programming language.

This course is intended to be a programming language-agnostic introduction to the concepts of software testing, debugging, and logging. However, there are some examples which are best represented in code.

I’m going to keep things as conceptual as possible so that it’s generally applicable knowledge. Though, where it makes sense to show a code example, I’m going to use Python3. 

The reason I selected Python is that it’s fairly readable code for the specific examples. So even if you’re unfamiliar with Python, the examples will be as simple as I can make them.

Before taking this course there are some things you’ll want to already know:

• You should have at least a conceptual understanding of programming.

• It’s okay if you’re not yet developing complex software. 

• As long as you’re comfortable with the concept of functions, classes, and methods, you’re likely ready for this course. 

During this course you’ll learn about:

• The purpose of unit testing

• The purpose of integration testing

• The concept of code coverage

• The concept of software debugging

• And some of the different debugging techniques.

• The concept of software logging

• And why some information shouldn’t be included inside log entries.

As a content creator, the only way to improve content is through your feedback. Positive or negative, if you have any feedback you’d like to share you can do that by emailing support@cloudacademy.com.

Now, if you’re ready to begin, then I will see you in the next lesson!