Importance of Software Design
Make your software flexible, scalable and maintainable
“Without good software design, programming is an art of adding bugs to an empty text file” -Louise Srygley
Hello developers,
I’ve seen a trend where most of the developers tend to jump to code directly, which is quite obvious because that is what we’ve been taught. This happened with me also, during my initial projects, I’ve always jumped to code directly. And I never realized the importance of designing because all those projects were small and developed by myself only. So I didn’t run into any problem while changing the software or maintaining it. But when I started working on a large scale project which required many developers to work together and it had a very complex implementation then I began to realize the importance of “Software Designing”.
What is Software Designing?
Software design is the process of defining software methods, functions, objects, and the overall structure and interaction of your code so that the resulting functionality will satisfy your user's requirements. It is the method of creating a representation of the complete software components and behavior before implementing the actual software. You need to follow design principles, which will lead you to develop more robust, maintainable & flexible software.
Now you might think: “I have never used designing but I have developed many software and guess what? they work”.
Well, congratulations, but development is not just about making the software. You need to change them regularly and maintain them for a long period of time. So let me ask you the following questions please take a minute and try to answer them.
- How easy it was to make changes to your code?
- Did a small code change produce a ripple-effect for changes elsewhere in the code?
- Was your code hard to reuse?
- Was the software difficult to maintain after a release?
- Did they have a good design? Could the design be done better?
- Was there even a design at all?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, chances are you could benefit from better software design. Good design isn’t just about code. It is about being able to express ideas for your software with other developers, other teams, and your clients. Having a well-thought design makes your software easier to implement, reduces a need for major changes later and saves you from headaches down the line.
Whether you’re a new developer looking to expand your knowledge, or an expert, knowledge of Software Design Architecture will help your software become flexible, reusable, and maintainable.
You might be thinking how can I design software. Well, there are various ways that can be used to design software. The most widely used method is the UML diagrams, CRC cards, mockups, etc.
Software designing can be summed up in two major phases-
- Conceptual Design
- Technical Design
Conceptual Design
In conceptual design, you might be interested in putting up pieces of software together in a non-technical manner. For example, you might want to list out all the components and their behavior, make some wireframe, flow diagrams, etc. So, in conceptual designing, we focus on the representation of the software in a non-technical manner.
Common methods used for conceptual designs are-
- Wireframes
- Mockups & Flow chart
- Component diagrams
- Class-Responsibility-Collaboration (CRC) cards.
Technical Design
After completing the conceptual design, now you might think about the technical pieces of stuff. Now, you might want to ask yourself questions like,
How it would get implemented?
How it will interact with the Server/Database?
How it will interact with other modules?
All these questions are answered in the technical design phase. In technical design, you basically deal with how the implementation would be done. Common methods of technical designs are-
- Class Diagrams
- Activity diagram
- Sequence diagram
- State Diagram
Benefits of good Software design
Why learn software designing?
You might be thinking: “why do this extra work? Why software designing is so important?”
You’ll be overwhelmed when you’ll understand the importance of good software design.
- One of the most important benefits of good software design is that you can easily change your software. As you might already know
“The only thing that is constant in software development is CHANGE”.
- Better designed software is more Flexible. So, you can add a new component to the existing software without affecting the existing software.
- Well-designed software increases Reusability. Because if you follow design patterns strictly, your software would be more modular ie. consisting of small components that do only one task. So, these small components can be reused easily.
- Easy to understand. It has been always a headache to explain projects to new hires/team members. But if you have good design & documentation, you can easily communicate the idea of the software to your new team member.
- Cost-efficiency is increased. You might be thinking how can designing can affect the cost of the software. To understand this, consider a situation in which you and your team started building software based on some assumptions, but after developing 50% of the software, you realize that you’ve met a dead-end and you can’t go ahead with those assumptions. Now, you’ll have to start the software again which would definitely be very costly. So, if you’ve focused on the design first, you could have figured out the dead-end earlier and saved a lot of time, work-force and money. Always remember, “Designing is far more cost-efficient than developing”
This is all for this post, I believe now you’ll first think about the designing rather than jumping directly to the development console. It’ll take some time and hard work but eventually it will surely pay off and reduce all kinds of risks with the software. If you don’t believe me, make a small project and try to design it and then develop it!
