How to Write an Effective Design Document » "Hello World" – The SlickEdit Developer Blog. Day by day, programmers are able to get more done in less time. With today’s high level languages, development environments, tools and the “rapid application development” mindset, both programmers and managers have become accustomed to extremely fast development cycles. Programmers are now more inclined to jump directly into development, fearing that every hour they are not writing code will result in an hour of overtime the weekend before the deadline. The process of designing before coding is becoming outdated. Documenting designs is becoming even rarer. Many developers have never written a design document and cringe at the idea of doing so. Many who are required to, typically generate a lot of interaction diagrams and class diagrams, which don’t often express the developer’s thought process during the design phase.
Why write a design document? A design document is a way for you to communicate to others what your design decisions are and why your decisions are good decisions. Usage. LePUS3. Example: Codechart modelling the Composite pattern in LePUS3 Purpose[edit] LePUS3 is tailored for the following purposes: Scalability: To model large-scale programs using small Codecharts with only few symbolsAutomated verifiability: To allow programmers to check fully automatically conformance to design so as to keep the design in synch with the implementationProgram visualization: To allow tools to reverse-engineer legible Codecharts from plain source code modeling their designPattern implementation: To allow tools to determine automatically whether your program implements a design patternDesign abstraction: To specify unimplemented programs without committing prematurely to implementation minutiaeGenericity: To model a design pattern not as a specific implementation but as a design motifRigour: To allow software designers to be sure exactly what Codecharts represent and reason rigorously about them Context[edit] LePUS3 belongs to the following families of languages: Vocabulary[edit]
TTP Toolkit - Home - Object-oriented design, visual modelling, formal specification, automated verification, reverse engineering, design mining, traceability, scalability. The design of computing systems can only properly succeed if it is well-grounded in theory, and ... the important concepts in a theory can only emerge through protracted exposure to application. — Robin Milner (1986) The Two-Tier Programming Toolkit is a prototype for a set of round-trip software engineering tools of object-oriented (Java, C++, C#, ...) programs developed by our team.
The current prototype supports software modelling and specifications, fully-automated conformance checking of Java 1.4 programs (design verification), and reverse-engineering charts from plain (native) Java 1.4 programs (visualization and design recovery). A controlled experiment testing the benefits of the version 0.5.3 of the Toolkit to Java programmers demonstrates statistically significant evidence (p-value=0.02) that the current prototype saves more than three quarters of the costs of key tasks in software development and maintenance with only minimal training (one hour).
Presented at: Part-funded by:
Design Techniques Articles. Exceptions.