Basic objective of a High Level Design Document
Filed Under Document, Design, Techniques, Model, Development | Posted on September 20, 2007
High level software design, also called software architecture is the first step to analyze and consider all requirements for a software and attempt to define a structure which is able to fulfill them. For this also the non-functional requirements have to be considered, such as scalability, portability and maintainability. This first design step has to be more or less independent of a programming language. This is not always 100% possible, but a good high level design can be further refined into a low level design, which then describes the implementation in any desired programming language.
High Level Design is the first of a (possibly) two-stage design process. The purpose of High Level Design is to:
* Make as many design decisions as possible before investing in coding effort
* Incorporate feedback from users and managers
* Provide documentation
The High Level Design document is medium to long, includes some diagrams and pictures, and is supplemented with software objects such as screen prototypes. It may show:
* Screen prototypes
* Narrative description of screen functions
* Data Model
* Major software module identification and description
* Interface definitions
* How key challenges and problems will be solved (example: how a simulation will be modeled using events and a concept of time).
In the High-Level Design, the Technical Architect of the project will study the proposed applications functional and non-functional (qualitative) requirements and design an overall solution architecture of the application which can handle those needs. During the High-Level design stage, a basic layout of the product is created. This means the setup of different modules and how they communicate with each other. This design does not contain very much detail about the modules.
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