Author Description

Software design sits at the technical kernel of the software engineering process and is applied regardless of the development paradigm and area of application. Design is the first step in the development phase for any engineered product or system. The designer's goal is to produce a model or representation of an entity that will later be built. Beginning, once system requirement have been specified and analyzed, system design is the first of the three technical activities -design, code and test that is required to build and verify software. The importance can be stated with a single word "Quality". Design is the place where quality is fostered in software development. Design provides us with representations of software that can assess for quality. Design is the only way that we can accurately translate a customer's view into a finished software product or system. Software design serves as a foundation for all the software engineering steps that follow. Without a strong design we risk building an unstable system - one that will be difficult to test, one whose quality cannot be assessed until the last stage.