Module

4
Software Design Issues
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Lesson
8
Basic Concepts in
Software Design
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Specific Instructional Objectives
At the end of this lesson the student will be able to:

Identify the software design activities.
Identify the items to be designed during the preliminary and detailed
design activities.
Identify the primary differences between analysis and design activities
Identify the important items developed during the software design phase.
State the important desirable characteristics of a good software design.
Identify the necessary features of a design document in order to facilitate
understandability.

Software design and its activities
Software design deals with transforming the customer requirements, as
described in the SRS document, into a form (a set of documents) that is suitable
for implementation in a programming language. A good software design is
seldom arrived by using a single step procedure but rather through several
iterations through a series of steps. Design activities can be broadly classified
into two important parts:
Preliminary (or high-level) design and
Detailed design.
Preliminary and detailed design activities
The meaning and scope of two design activities (i.e. high-level and detailed
design) tend to vary considerably from one methodology to another. High-level
design means identification of different modules and the control relationships
among them and the definition of the interfaces among these modules. The
outcome of high-level design is called the program structure or software
architecture. Many different types of notations have been used to represent a
high-level design. A popular way is to use a tree-like diagram called the structure
chart to represent the control hierarchy in a high-level design. However, other
notations such as J ackson diagram [1975] or Warnier-Orr [1977, 1981] diagram
can also be used. During detailed design, the data structure and the algorithms
of the different modules are designed. The outcome of the detailed design stage
is usually known as the module-specification document.

Difference between analysis and design
The aim of analysis is to understand the problem with a view to eliminate any
deficiencies in the requirement specification such as incompleteness,
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inconsistencies, etc. The model which we are trying to build may be or may not
be ready.

The aim of design is to produce a model that will provide a seamless
transition to the coding phase, i.e. once the requirements are analyzed and found
to be satisfactory, a design model is created which can be easily implemented.

Items developed during the software design phase
For a design to be easily implemented in a conventional programming language,
the following items must be designed during the design phase.
Different modules required to implement the design solution.
Control relationship among the identified modules. The relationship is also
known as the call relationship or invocation relationship among modules.
Interface among different modules. The interface among different modules
identifies the exact data items exchanged among the modules.
Data structures of the individual modules.
Algorithms required to implement each individual module.

Characteristics of a good software design
The definition of a good software design can vary depending on the application
being designed. For example, the memory size used by a program may be an
important issue to characterize a good solution for embedded software
development since embedded applications are often required to be
implemented using memory of limited size due to cost, space, or power
consumption considerations. For embedded applications, one may sacrifice
design comprehensibility to achieve code compactness. For embedded
applications, factors like design comprehensibility may take a back seat while
judging the goodness of design. Therefore, the criteria used to judge how good a
given design solution is can vary widely depending upon the application. Not only
is the goodness of design dependent on the targeted application, but also the
notion of goodness of a design itself varies widely across software engineers and
academicians. However, most researchers and software engineers agree on a
few desirable characteristics that every good software design for general
application must possess. The characteristics are listed below:

Correctness: A good design should correctly implement all the
functionalities identified in the SRS document.
Understandability: A good design is easily understandable.
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Efficiency: It should be efficient.
Maintainability: It should be easily amenable to change.

Possibly the most important goodness criterion is design correctness. A design
has to be correct to be acceptable. Given that a design solution is correct,
understandability of a design is possibly the most important issue to be
considered while judging the goodness of a design. A design that is easy to
understand is also easy to develop, maintain and change. Thus, unless a design
is easily understandable, it would require tremendous effort to implement and
maintain it.

Features of a design document

In order to facilitate understandability, the design should have the following
features:

It should use consistent and meaningful names for various design
components.
The design should be modular. The term modularity means that it should
use a cleanly decomposed set of modules.
It should neatly arrange the modules in a hierarchy, e.g. in a tree-like
diagram.

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