Software development is the translation of a user need or marketing goal into a software product. Software development is sometimes understood to encompass the processes of software engineering combined with the research and goals of software marketing to develop computer software products. This is in contrast to marketing software, which may or may not involve new product development.

It is often difficult to isolate whether engineering or marketing is more responsible for the success or failure of a software product to satisfy customer expectations. This is why it is important to understand both processes and/or facilitate collaboration between both engineering and marketing in the total software development process. Engineering and marketing concerns are often balanced in the role of a project manager that may or may not use that title.

Software Developer
A software developer is a person who is concerned with one or more facets of the software development process, a somewhat broader scope of computer programming or a specialty of project managing. This person may contribute to the overview of the project on the application level rather than component level or individual programming tasks. Software developers are often still guided by lead programmers but also encompasses the class of freelance software developers.

Other names which are often used in the same close context are software analyst and software engineer.With time, differences between system design, software development and programming are more apparent. Already in the current market place there can be found a segregation between programmers and developers, being that one who actually implements is not the same as the one who designs the class structure or hierarchy. Even more so that developers become systems architects, those who design the multi-leveled architecture or component interactions of a large software system.

Software Companies
The term software company could be applied to: a) a company that produces software, distributes software from a third party, or provides services such as custom software development.

Functional Specifications
In software development, a functional specification (also, functional spec or specs or functional specifications document (FSD)) is the set of documentation that describes the behavior of a computer program or larger software system. The documentation typically describes various inputs that can be provided to the software system and how the system responds to those inputs.

Functional specification does not typically define the inner workings of the proposed system. Instead, it focuses on what various outside agents (people using the program, computer peripherals, or other computers, for example) might "observe" when interacting with the system.