CS 4490z/4460z Design Report

    (for Software Projects only)

Weight: 15%

Note: The Design Report must be signed by your supervisor(s) to indicate approval of the requirements content.

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The Design Report should be considered a ``blueprint'' for the software system that is to be built. It should facilitate the analysis, planning and implementation of the system. It has two primary roles:

• to act as a medium for communicating design information to implementers
• to act as a reference document to assist in future maintenance and support of the software system once it is operational.

For the purposes of this course, the design report should concentrate on the “high-level” design aspects. Details of every function or procedure are NOT required, i.e. detailed pseudo-code is NOT expected.

The Design Report should include descriptions of the following:

• Architectural overview of the system: this should provide an overview of the main hardware/software/data components, and their relationships to other systems that the proposed software would have to interact with. (This can often be done via a diagram and brief textual descriptions.)
• Any assumptions, constraints, standards that are being assumed,  i.e. anything that an implementer may need to know when implementing or maintaining the system.
• Decomposition of the system: descriptions of the entities (objects) of the system, e.g. the subsystems, modules, major data abstractions (files and internal data structures and associated operations). 
  For each entity, there should be:
• A description of the entity; its purpose.
• A list of attributes or properties, constraints, assumptions, about the entity.
• An indication of any dependencies of that entity on other entities within the system or outside of it.
• A description/specification of the interface to the entity.
• Overview of the control and information flow through the system.

Format:

The document can be a combination of text, diagrams, pictures, tables, etc.

A rough outline of the design document might look like this:

1. Title Page (see Report Format and Style Guidelines)
2. Table of Contents (useful here since the report is relatively long)
3. Introduction: general description of the software system
4. Architectural overview: main hardware, software, data components (i.e. main subsystems)
5. Overview of control and information flow through the system
6. Design (details of modules, data structures, files) – this is the main part of the report
7. References

Approximate Length:

All projects are different, but an approximate length of at least 10 pages (not including Title Page and Table of Contents) is suggested.  (This is not a hard and fast rule; it is just to give you an idea of the level of detail required for this document.)