Bulldozer00's Blog

Alright, before we go on, let’s first get something out of the way so that we can start from the same context. This post is not about Small Scale Development (SSD) projects. As the following figure shows, on SDD projects one can successfully write code directly from a list of requirements (with some iterative back-and-forth of course) or set of use cases or (hopefully not) both.

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s talk about the real subject of this post: Large Scale Development (LSD <- appropriate acronym, no?) projects. On hallucinogenic LSD efforts, one or possibly two additional activities are required to secure any chance at timely success. As the next figure shows, these two activities are “System Design” and “Software Design“.

So, what’s the difference between “system design” and “software design“? Well, if you’re developing software-intensive products for a specialized business domain (e.g. avionics, radar, sonar, medical, taxes), then you’re gonna need domain experts to bridge the GOHI (Gulf Of Human Intellect) between the higher level requirements and the lower level software design…..

Most specialized domain experts don’t know enough about general software design (object-oriented, structured, functional) and most software experts don’t know enough about domain-specific design to allow for successfully skipping the system design phase/stage. But that hasn’t stopped orgs from doing this….