Software Engineering-Architectural Designs

Design has been described as a multistep process in which representations of data and program structure, interface characteristics, and procedural detail are synthesized from information requirements. This description is extended by Freeman :

Design is an activity concerned with making major decisions, often of a structural nature. It shares with programming a concern for abstracting information representation and processing sequences, but the level of detail is quite different at the extremes. Design builds coherent, well planned representations of programs that concentrate on the interrelationships of parts at the higher level and the logical operations involved at the lower levels . . .

As we have noted in the preceding chapter, design is information driven. Software design methods are derived from consideration of each of the three domains of the analysis model. The data, functional, and behavioral domains serve as a guide for the creation of the software design.

Methods required to create “coherent, well planned representations” of the data and architectural layers of the design model are presented in this chapter. The objective is to provide a systematic approach for the derivation of the architectural design—the preliminary blueprint from which software is constructed