Design Guidelines and Design Principles

Continuing on the earlier post about design processes in software engineering:

Design Guidelines:

The criterion for a good design in order to evaluate the quality is as follows:
- It should have a good architectural structure.
- It should be modular in nature.
- It should lead to interfaces properly.
- It should contain distinct representations of data, architecture, interfaces, components.
- It should lead to data structures that are appropriate for the objects that are to be implemented.
- It should lead to components that have independent functional characteristics.
- A design should be derived using a repeatable method that is driven by information obtained during software requirements analysis.


Design Principles

A set of principles for software design are ::

- The design process should not suffer from “tunnel vision”.
- The design should be traceable to the analysis model.
- The design should not reinvent the wheel.
- The design should “minimize the intellectual distance” between the software and the problem in the real world.
- The design should exhibit uniformity and integration.
- The design should be structured to accommodate change.
- The design should be structured to degrade gently.
- Design is not coding.
- The design should be assessed for quality.
- The design should be reviewed to minimize conceptual errors.