The nature of Software Design process

The nature of Design process

Software design is the process of implementing software solutions to one or more set of problems. One of the important parts of software design is the software requirements analysis (SRA). It is a part of the software development process that lists specifications used in software engineering. If the software is "semi-automated" or user centered, software design may involve user experience design yielding a story board to help determine those specifications. If the software is completely automated (meaning no user or user interface), a software design may be as simple as a flow chart or text describing a planned sequence of events. There are also semi-standard methods like Unified Modeling Language and Fundamental modeling concepts. In either case, some documentation of the plan is usually the product of the design. Furthermore, a software design may be platform-independent or platform-specific, depending on the availability of the technology used for the design.

Software design can be considered as creating a solution to a problem in hand with available capabilities. The main difference between Software analysis and design is that the output of a software analysis consist of smaller problems to solve. Also, the analysis should not be very different even if it is designed by different team members or groups. The design focuses on the capabilities, and there can be multiple designs for the same problem depending on the environment that solution will be hosted. They can be operations systems, web pages, mobile or even the new cloud computing paradigm. Sometimes the design depends on the environment that it was developed for, whether it is created from reliable frameworks or implemented with suitable design patterns.

When designing software, two important factors to consider are its security and usability.