1. Table of Content

• 1. Table of Content
• 2. Introduction
• 3. How to arrange pre-requisites
• 4. Set up your first project
• 5. Create software using GEARS

2. Introduction

This introduction described what you need to know before we can start.

Normal software development for the most part is a lot of manual work.

• Requirements: you make the wishes of the customer clear.
• Design: you determine which steps the computer needs to execute to fullfil those wishes.
• Code: you describe those steps in the form of a programming language and let a tool transform this to an "executable" piece of software.
• Test: you check if that software will actually fullfil the requirements.
• Accept: the customer checks if that software actually is what they wanted.
• Deploy: you install and configure the software in such a way that the customer (or the end users) can use it.

Normal software development environments (SDE's) are sets of tools that help a software developer with this. Some SDE's can even automate part of these steps and the best competing SDE's can automate Code and Deploy. However, GEARS is the only SDE that doesn't require you to do manual Designing, Coding, Testing and Deploying your software. That makes using GEARS by far the most efficient way of creating software.

This is possible because GEARS works fundamentally different. Instead of designing or describing the steps that the computer needs to perform, you only need to describe the Required result the software should achieve. In other words the requirements. GEARS will automatically Design and Code the software that will achieve that required result. It will also do this without error and fully fulfilling the requirements, which means that in effect Test is not needed anymore. However, you may still forget things in the requirements and your software may also need to communicate with other systems that may have errors. That is why you should still do some Testing (although a lot less).

flowchart LR
  subgraph Design
  direction LR
  1(step 1)-->2(step 2)--condition1-->3(step 3)-->4(step 4)
  2--condition2-->5(step 5)-->6(step 6)-->4
  end
  subgraph Requirements[Required \nresult]
  end
  Design-->Requirements
  style Requirements fill:#f00,stroke:#000,stroke-width:4px,color:#fff

With this document I will help you to creating working software solutions with GEARS. We are going to learn by doing. So for the most part I will explain what you need to do and sometimes what you need to know. But you will have to do the learning. So don't just execute what I tell you to do, but really understand what is going on and learn from it in such a way that you can do it again when you create all sorts of different software solutions. Also try to make small changes to the software your create. It is a great way to learn it even better.

Of course I will not explain the basics of how to use your computer, install tools on your computer and how to configure it. You should either already know that already, search for how to do that on the internet or ask somebody to help you.

So let's get started 😀.

3. How to arrange pre-requisites

Follow these instructions to arrange all the things you need to start developing software with GEARS: GS_01_Arrange_pre-requisites

4. Set up your first project

Follow these instructions to set up your first project: GS_02_Set_up_your_project

5. Create software using GEARS

This chapter contains links to instructions that will explain how to create software with GEARS. Each link build upon the previous. You therefore have to do them in this order:

1. GS_03_Create_first_working_app
2. GS_04_Try_to_break_things
3. GS_05_Create_multiple_results
4. GS_06_Lists_and_details