Today’s catch up lecture was title ‘The Nature of Good Design’ and began our work on the Design phase [PADIS]. David’s analogy for the Design phase in comparison to the Analysis phase was, ‘the analysis phase is like the architects rendering of a how a house will look and its features… the design phase is the conversion of that outline into a blueprint from which the house can be built’.
Three questions need to be answered this week:
- What components require systems design?
- User Interface
- Network
- Database
- Application
- System Interface
- What are the inputs of the Design phase?
- Analysis activities (in the form of models and documents)
- Business Events, processes and environment
- System requirements
- Other requirements
- Object Oriented Development: Class diagram, Use Case Diagram, System Sequence Diagram, Activity Diagram, State Machine Diagram (if needed)
- Analysis activities (in the form of models and documents)
- What are the outputs of the Design phase?
- Define, Organize and Structure components of the final system solution (a blueprint for construction)
- Object Oriented Development: Package Diagram, Design class Diagrams, Interaction Diagram, Object DB schema
- Traditional: System Fowl Charts, Relational Database Schema etc.
- How is systems design done?
- See the components listed in the first set of bullets (each point requires its own architecture)
- Ensuring the output of the design phase must provide the logical framework for programming (Implementation)