Discuss the Objectives of the Design Phase

Design is essentially the bridge between requirements specification and the final solution for satisfying the requirements.  The goal of the design process is to produce a model or representation of a system, which can be used later to build that system. The produced model is called the design of the system. The design of a system is essentially a blueprint or a plan for a solution for the system. The design process for software systems often has two levels.

 At the first level the focus is on deciding which modules are needed for the system, the specifications of these modules, and how the modules should be interconnected. This is what is called the system design or top-level design. In the second level, the internal design of the modules, or how the specifications of the module can be satisfied, is decided.

This design level is often called detailed design or logic design. Detailed design essentially expands to the system design to contain a more detailed description of the processing logic and data structures so that the design is sufficiently complete for coding. A design methodology is a systematic approach to creating a design by applying a set of techniques and guidelines. Most design methodologies essentially offer a set of guidelines that can be used by the developer to design a system.

The input to the design phase is the specifications for the system to be designed. Hence a reasonable entry criteria can be that the specifications are stable and have been approved, hoping that the approval mechanism will ensure that the specifications are complete, consistent, unambiguous, etc. The output of the top-level design phase is the architectural design or the system design for the software system to be built. 

A design can be object-oriented or function-oriented. In function-oriented design the design consists of module definitions, with each module supporting a functional abstraction. In object-oriented design, the modules in the design represent data abstraction.

The purpose of the design phase is to specify the components for this transformation function, so that each component is also a transformation function. Hence, the basic output of the system design phase, when a function oriented design approach is being followed, is the definition of all the major data structures in the system, all the major modules of the system, and how the modules interact with each other.