Deck 12: Design Concepts

Question 1

List three characteristics that can serve as a guide to evaluate design quality.

Answer 1

Design implements all explicit requirements from the analysis model,as well as accommodating implicit customer requirements.
Design must be understandable to the people who generate the code to implement design,those who test it,and those who support it.
Design must provide a complete picture of the software,addressing the data,functional,and behavioral domains from an implementation perspective.

Question 2

List the four design models required for a complete specification of a software design and the role of each.

Answer 2

Data design - high level model depicting user's view of the data or information.
Architecture design - shows relationships and collaborations among specific analysis model software and hardware elements
Interface design - interface depicts a set of operations that describe the externally observable behavior of a class and provides access to its operations
Component-level design - describes the internal detail of each software component
Deployment-level design - indicates how software functionality and subsystems will be allocated in the physical computing environment that will support the software

Question 3

Describe the principle of information hiding as it applies to software design.

Answer 3

The principle of information hiding implies that modules only share information with each other on a "need to know" basis to achieve some specific software function.Hiding enforces the procedural constraints to both the module procedural detail and any data structures local to the module.
Final Exam Question

Question 4

Explain how effective modular design is achieved through functional independence of the individual modules?