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SYSTEM DESIGN
Design Objectives
Design Principles
Effective Modular Design
Design Tools and Techniques
Prototyping Structured Programming
Unit 4
System Design
Learning Objectives
After reading this unit you should appreciate the following:
· Design Objectives
· Design Principles
· Effective Modular Design
· Design Tools and Techniques
· Prototyping Structured Programming
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Design Objectives
The beginning of the design phase marks a transaction from describing what the solution looks like, “specifications” to how the problem is going to be solved. The design document that we will develop during this phase is the blueprint of the software. It describes how the solution to the customer problem is to be built. Since solution to complex problems isn’t usually found in the first try, iterations are most likely required. This is true for software design as well. For this reason, any design strategy, design method, or design language must be flexible and must easily accommodate changes due to iterations in the design.
Complex problems aren’t usually solved in one step. Rather, they are solved using the principle of “divide and conquer,” where the problem is divided into a set of sub-problems that are solved more easily. The partial solutions are than combined to become an overall problem solution. Any technique or design needs to support and guide the partitioning process in such a way that the resulting sub-problems are as independent as possible from each other and can be combined easily for the solution to the overall problem. Sub-problem independence and easy combination of their solutions reduces the complexity of the problem. This is the objective of the partitioning process. Partitioning or decomposition during design involves three types of decisions: -
l Define the boundaries along which to break;
l Determine into how money pieces to break; and
l Identify the proper level of detail when design should stop and implementation should start.
Basic design principles that enable the software engineer to navigate the design process suggest a set of principles for software design, which have been adapted and extended in the following list:
l Free from the suffer from "tunnel vision." A good designer should consider alternative approaches, judging each based on the requirements of the problem, the resources available to do the job.
l The design should be traceable to the analysis model. Because a single element of the design model often traces to multiple requirements, it is necessary to have a means for tracking how requirements have been satisfied by the design model.
l The design should not repeat the same thing. Systems are constructed using a set of design patterns, many of which have likely been encountered before. These patterns should always be chosen as an alternative to reinvention. Time is short and resources are limited! Design time should be invested in representing truly new ideas and integrating those patterns that already exist.
l The design should "minimize the intellectual distance" between the software and the problem as it exists in the real world. That is, the structure of the software design should (whenever possible) mimic the structure of the problem domain.
l The design should exhibit uniformity and integration. A design is uniform if it appears that one person developed the entire thing. Rules of style and format should be defined for a design team before design work begins. A design is integrated if care is taken in defining interfaces between design components.
The design activity begins when the requirements document for the software to be developed is available. This may be the SRS for the complete system, as is the case if the waterfall model is being followed or the requirements for the next "iteration" if the iterative enhancement is being followed or the requirements for the prototype if the prototyping is being followed. While the requirements specification activity is entirely in the problem domain, design is the first step in moving from the problem domain toward the solution domain. Design is essentially the bridge between requirements specification and the final solution for satisfying the requirements.
The design of a system is essentially a blueprint or a plan for a solution for the system. We consider a system to be a set of components with clearly defined behavior that interacts with each other in a fixed defined manner to produce some behavior or services for its environment. A component of a system can be considered a system, with its own components. In a software system, a component is a software module.
The design process for software systems, often, has two levels. At the first level, the focus is on deciding which modules are needed for the system, the specifications of these modules, and how the modules should be interconnected. This is what is called the system design or top-level design. In the second level, the internal design of the modules, or how the specifications of the module can be satisfied, is decided. This design level is often called detailed design or logic design. Detailed design essentially expands the system design to contain a more detailed description of the processing logic and data structures so that the design is sufficiently complete for coding.
Because the detailed design is an extension of system design, the system design controls the major structural characteristics of the system. The system design has a major impact on the testability and modifiability of a system, and it impacts its efficiency. Much of the design effort for designing software is spent creating the system design.
The input to the design phase is the specifications for the system to be designed. Hence, a reasonable entry criteria can be that the specifications are stable and have been approved, hoping that the approval mechanism will ensure that the specifications are complete, consistent, unambiguous, etc. The output of the top-level design phase is the architectural design or the system design for the software system to be built. This can be produced with or without using a design methodology. A reasonable exit criteria for the phase could be that the design has been verified against the input specifications and has been evaluated and approved for quality.
A design can be object-oriented or function-oriented. In function-oriented design, the design consists of module definitions, with each module supporting a functional abstraction. In object-oriented design, the modules in the design represent data abstraction (these abstractions are discussed in more detail later). In the function-oriented methods for design and describe one particular methodology the structured design methodology in some detail. In a function- oriented design approach, a system is viewed as a transformation function, transforming the inputs to the desired outputs. The purpose of the design phase is to specify the components for this transformation function, so that each component is also a transformation function. Hence, the basic output of the system design phase, when a function oriented design approach is being followed, is the definition of all the major data structures in the system, all the major modules of the system, and how the modules interact with each other.
Student Activity 4.1
Before reading the next section, answer the following questions.
1. What is the importance of design objectives?
2. What are the important factors in design objectives?
If your answers are correct, then proceed to the next section.
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Design Principles
Every intellectual discipline is characterized by fundamental concepts and specific techniques. Techniques are the manifestations of the concepts as they apply to a particular situation. Techniques come and go with changes in technology; intellectual fades economic conditions, and social concerns. By defining, fundamental principles remain the same throughout. They provide the underline basis for development and evaluation of techniques. Fundamental concepts of software design include abstraction, structure, information hiding, modularity, concurrency, verification, and design aesthetics.
The design of a system is correct, if a system built precisely according to the design satisfies the requirements of that system. Clearly, the goal during the design phase is to produce correct design. However, correctness is not the sole criterion during the design phase, as there can be many correct designs. The goal of the design process is not simply to produce a design for the system. Instead, the goal is to find the best possible design within the limitations imposed by the requirements and the physical and social environment in which the system will operate.
To evaluate a design, we have to specify some properties and criteria that can be used for evaluation. Ideally, these properties should be as quantitative as possible. In that situation, we can mathematically evaluate the "goodness" of a design and use mathematical techniques to formally determine the best design. However, as with many objects in the real world, criteria for quality of software design are often subjective or non-quantifiable. In such a situation, criteria are essentially thumb rules that aid design evaluation.
A design should clearly be verifiable, complete (implements all the specifications), and traceable (all design elements can be traced to some requirements). However, the two most important properties that concern designers are efficiency and simplicity. Efficiency of any system is concerned with the proper use of scarce resources by the system. The need for efficiency arises due to cost considerations. If some resources are scarce and expensive, it is desirable that those resources be used efficiently. In computer systems, the resources that are most often considered for efficiency are processor time and memory. An efficient system is one that consumes less processor time and requires less memory. In earlier days, the efficient use of CPU and memory was important due to the high cost of hardware. Now that the hardware costs are small compared to the software costs, for many software systems, traditional efficiency concerns now take a back seat compared to other considerations. One of the exceptions is real-time system, where there are strict execution time constraints.
Simplicity is, perhaps, the most important quality criteria for software systems. We have seen that maintenance of software is usually quite expensive. Maintainability of software is one of the goals we have established. The design of a system is one of the most important factors affecting the maintainability of a system. During maintenance, the first step a maintainer has to undertake is to understand the system to be maintained. Only after a maintainer has a thorough understanding of the different modules of the system, how they are interconnected, and how modifying one will affect the others, should the modification be undertaken. A simple and understandable design will go a long way in making the job of the maintainer easier.
These criteria are not independent, and increasing one may have an unfavorable effect on another. For example, often the "tricks" used to increase efficiency of a system result in making the system more complex. Therefore, design decisions frequently involve trade-offs. It is the designers' job to recognize the trade-offs and achieve the best balance. For our purposes, simplicity is the primary property of interest, and therefore the objective of the design process is to produce designs that are simple to understand.
Creating a simple (and efficient) design of a large system can be an extremely complex task that requires good engineering judgment. As designing is fundamentally a creative activity, it cannot be reduced to a series of steps that can be simply followed, though guidelines can be provided. In this section, we will examine some basic guiding principles that can be used to produce the design of a system. Some of these design principles are concerned with providing means to effectively handle the complexity of the design process. Effectively handling the complexity will not only reduce the effort needed for design (i.e., reduce the design cost), but can also reduce the scope of introducing errors during design. The principles discussed here form the basis for most of the design methodologies.
It should be noted that the principles that can be used in design are the same as those used in problem analysis. In fact, the methods are also similar because in both analysis and design we are essentially constructing models. However, there are some fundamental differences. First, in problem analysis, we are constructing a model of the problem domain, while in design we are constructing a model for the solution domain. Second, in problem analysis, the analyst has limited degrees of freedom in selecting the models as the problem is given, and modeling has to represent it. In design, the designer has a great deal of freedom in deciding the models, as the system the designer is modeling does not exist; in fact, the designer is creating a model for the system that will be the basis of building the system. That is, in design, the system depends on the model, while in problem analysis the model depends on the system. Finally, as pointed out earlier, the basic aim of modeling in problem analysis is to understand, while the basic aim of modeling in design is to optimize (in our case, simplicity and performance). In other words, though the basic principles and techniques might look similar, the activities of analysis and design are very different.
The Design Process
It presents the following guidelines:
1. A design should exhibit an architectural structure that (a) has been created using recognizable design patterns, (b) is composed of components that exhibit good design characteristics, and (c) can be implemented in an evolutionary fashion, thereby facilitating implementation and testing.
2. A design should be modular; that is, the software should be logically partitioned into elements that perform specific functions and sub-functions.
3. A design should contain distinct representations of data, architecture, interfaces, and components (modules).
4. A design should lead to data structures that are appropriate for the objects to be implemented and are drawn from recognizable data patterns.
5. A design should lead to components that exhibit independent functional characteristics.
6. A design should aid to interfaces that reduce the complexity of connections between modules and with the external environment.
7. A design should be derived using a repeatable method that is driven by information obtained during software requirements analysis.