Software Design Basics
Software design is a process to transform user requirements into some suitable form, which
helps the programmer in software coding and implementation.
For assessing user requirements, an SRS (Software Requirement Specification) document is
created whereas for coding and implementation, there is a need of more specific and detailed
requirements in software terms. The output of this process can directly be used into
implementation in programming languages.
Software design is the first step in SDLC (Software Design Life Cycle), which moves the
concentration from problem domain to solution domain. It tries to specify how to fulfill the
requirements mentioned in SRS.
Software design is a mechanism to transform user requirements into some suitable form, which
helps the programmer in software coding and implementation. It deals with representing the
client's requirement, as described in SRS (Software Requirement Specification) document, into a
form, i.e., easily implementable using programming language.
The software design phase is the first step in SDLC (Software Design Life Cycle), which moves
the concentration from the problem domain to the solution domain. In software design, we
consider the system to be a set of components or modules with clearly defined behaviors &
boundaries.
Objectives of Software Design
1. Correctness: Software design should be correct as per requirement.
2. Completeness: The design should have all components like data structures, modules, and
external interfaces, etc.
3. Efficiency: Resources should be used efficiently by the program.
4. Flexibility: Able to modify on changing needs.
5. Consistency: There should not be any inconsistency in the design.
6. Maintainability: The design should be so simple so that it can be easily maintainable by
other designers.
Software Design Levels
Software design yields three levels of results:
Architectural Design - The architectural design is the highest abstract version of the
system. It identifies the software as a system with many components interacting with
each other. At this level, the designers get the idea of proposed solution domain.
High-level Design- The high-level design breaks the ‘single entity-multiple component’
concept of architectural design into less-abstracted view of sub-systems and modules and
depicts their interaction with each other. High-level design focuses on how the system
along with all of its components can be implemented in forms of modules. It recognizes
modular structure of each sub-system and their relation and interaction among each other.
Detailed Design- Detailed design deals with the implementation part of what is seen as a
system and its sub-systems in the previous two designs. It is more detailed towards
modules and their implementations. It defines logical structure of each module and their
interfaces to communicate with other modules.
The design phase of software development deals with transforming the customer requirements as
described in the SRS documents into a form implementable using a programming language.
The software design process can be divided into the following three levels of phases of design:
1. Interface Design
2. Architectural Design
3. Detailed Design
Interface Design:
Interface design is the specification of the interaction between a system and its environment. this
phase proceeds at a high level of abstraction with respect to the inner workings of the system i.e,
during interface design, the internal of the systems are completely ignored and the system is
treated as a black box. Attention is focussed on the dialogue between the target system and the
users, devices, and other systems with which it interacts. The design problem statement produced
during the problem analysis step should identify the people, other systems, and devices which are
collectively called agents.
Interface design should include the following details:
Precise description of events in the environment, or messages from agents to which the
system must respond.
Precise description of the events or messages that the system must produce.
Specification on the data, and the formats of the data coming into and going out of the
system.
Specification of the ordering and timing relationships between incoming events or
messages, and outgoing events or outputs.
Architectural Design:
Architectural design is the specification of the major components of a system, their
responsibilities, properties, interfaces, and the relationships and interactions between them. In
architectural design, the overall structure of the system is chosen, but the internal details of major
components are ignored.
Issues in architectural design includes:
Gross decomposition of the systems into major components.
Allocation of functional responsibilities to components.
Component Interfaces
Component scaling and performance properties, resource consumption properties,
reliability properties, and so forth.
Communication and interaction between components.
The architectural design adds important details ignored during the interface design. Design of the
internals of the major components is ignored until the last phase of the design.
Detailed Design:
Design is the specification of the internal elements of all major system components, their
properties, relationships, processing, and often their algorithms and the data structures.
The detailed design may include:
Decomposition of major system components into program units.
Allocation of functional responsibilities to units.
User interfaces
Unit states and state changes
Data and control interaction between units
Data packaging and implementation, including issues of scope and visibility of program
elements
Algorithms and data structures