Introduction to Design

1
Introduction to Design

• Lecture 7
• September 20, 2000

2
Introduction to Design

• We will introduce design from the following views
• What is designing
• Generic design versus software design
• The three elements of design
• Design activities
• Design representations
• Design artifacts

3
What is Designing?

• The process or set of activities associated with
  producing an artifact that is useful to society
• The usefulness part is to differentiate
  engineering, architectural and software design
  from artistic design.

4
Generic vs. Software Design

• Are there a common set of activities that all
  designers do? And if we understood them would it
  help us be better software designers?
• Yes and Yes

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Generic Design Activities

• Problem Formulation
• Generation of Alternatives
• Evaluation
• Identifying Constraints
• Using abstraction to hide details until needed
• Opportunistically synthesizing solutions

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Software Design Activities

• Problem formulation - Requirements
• Using abstraction - Pick any representation
• Synthesizing solutions - Prototyping
• Evaluation - Testing and Quality Assurance
• Identifying constraints - Performance or
  maintainability

7
So what is design?

• A set of activities
• The products resulting from those activities
  (programs)
• The representations used by those activities