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Detailed
Design
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Detailed Design is the second of a (possibly) two-stage design process. The purpose of Detailed Design is to:
- Make as many design decisions as possible before investing in coding effort
- Provide for developer design review
- Provide programmer documentation
The audience of Detailed Design includes the developer himself and other developers.
Key Points
Again, there are many, many points that can be made about good design, but Software Partners believes the key point here is to:
- Restrain the urge to begin coding until the maximum amount of work has been done "on paper".
This results in the most efficient product as optimizations, code reuse, naming conventions, etc. can be worked out before the investment in compiling and debugging is made.
It does take maturity and experience on the part of the developer to be able to work this way.
Deliverables
This process results in a Design Review and (usually) a Detailed Design Document. The Detailed Design document may be quite lengthy and includes:
- Pseudocode for tricky passages
- Class and component definitions
- Subroutine stubs
- Database server objects such as nulls, ranges, defaults, triggers, and stored procedures
- Definition of other such software objects that are meaningful to developers
Appropriate Methodology
Detailed Design is not always done. In projects using only high level tools such as 4GL or customizable off-the-shelf applications, it may not be appropriate at all.
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