How to write a design document?
Planning is crucial for any successful activity, be in winning a cricket match, cooking your favourite dish or even creating a world-class product. To enable you to decide and plan a design document comes in handy.
A design document is a detailed document of how you plan to build your product. Once you start writing a design document, you put in a lot of thoughts to it; you thoroughly plan your product, the UI, front-end, the backend, the hosting and the marriage of the three.
A design document is also helpful when you are working in a team. It helps you to nail down all the possible challenges ahead of you as a team, which in turn results in a better product than what you would have without any planning.
An ideal design document consists at least all of the following:-
1. Title
The title should be in sync with the document. Pick an easily understandable title. Add the names of all the authors.
For example:- Bot for lazy payments. By Tony Stark, Bruce Banner, and Steve Rogers.
2. Summary
The summary you write should be high level, and it should be the gist of the entire document. Reading your summary should give value to the reader. It should entail what does the product actually do.
For Example:-
This document serves as the implementation plan and defines the scope of the virtualization project. This document identifies points of contact for the project, lists implementation requirements, provides a brief description of each of the document deliverables, deliverables, and provides an overview of the implementation process for the data-centre virtualization project.
3. Tools used
Here you list down all the tools and libraries you have used to build your product.
For example:-
- Java Libraries
- Web Browsers — Google Chrome + Mozilla Firefox at least.
- Version Control — Git command line.
- Text Editor — Sublime Text/Visual Studio code.
- Browser developer tools — Chrome/Firefox developer tools.
- Image manipulation software: — Adobe Photoshop CS6.
4. Technical Architecture
Technical Architecture is a flow chart of the various moving pieces in your product with the explanation of each box.
For example:-
5. Feasibility
This section of your document should depict if your thoughts behind the product are viable, practical and achievable. You should include the potential failure conditions and how you have handled those.
Happy Coding!
