Part of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), the Design Phase is the "how" part -- where the list of Requirements that were developed in the Requirements Gathering/Definition Phase are used to develop the architecture, by defining the components, their interfaces and behaviors.
The architecture is documented as a set of system design documents, which describe a plan to implement the requirements.
Details on computer programming languages and environments, machines, packages, application architecture, distributed architecture layering, memory size, platform, algorithms, data structures, global type definitions, interfaces, and many other engineering details are established.
Depending on the scope and size of the project, the system design specifications can include dioramas, sketches, flow charts, site trees, HTML screen designs, prototypes, photo impressions and UML schemas -- basically all that's required to unambiguously specify what has to be purchased, developed, assembled and implemented to fulfill the specified Requirements.
The system design specifications developed during this phase are then used by the development team in the next phase, the Development Phase.
Part of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), the Design Phase is the "how" part -- where the list of Requirements that were developed in the Requirements Gathering/Definition Phase are used to develop the architecture, by defining the components, their interfaces and behaviors.
The architecture is documented as a set of system design documents, which describe a plan to implement the requirements.
Details on computer programming languages and environments, machines, packages, application architecture, distributed architecture layering, memory size, platform, algorithms, data structures, global type definitions, interfaces, and many other engineering details are established.
Depending on the scope and size of the project, the system design specifications can include dioramas, sketches, flow charts, site trees, HTML screen designs, prototypes, photo impressions and UML schemas -- basically all that's required to unambiguously specify what has to be purchased, developed, assembled and implemented to fulfill the specified Requirements.
The system design specifications developed during this phase are then used by the development team in the next phase, the Development Phase.