I guess the point is that I participated in some of the aspects of the softwares life cycle. I did more than just debug it. Even if the work I did is considered small as compared to the work of a career professional, I was able to participate in some of the same activities as them and in a real world setting with real users and real consequences. That is something I have never seen simulated in class. What I did here, was look at the way the data was being used and handled as well as the requirements of the user.
Some data structures lend themselves to certain needs better than others.
For instance, one of the issues had to do with the volume of data. The user told me that the current limit on the number of files that the software was able to handle at the same time was too small. He wanted me to increase the number of data entries allowed by software. This was easy enough, but he did not have a number that would work, he just knew that he had extremely large amounts of data and the program could not handle it. The amount of data was also inconsistent.