Today's Design Tools -- Are They Really Better?

One of the key features of any design is its simplicity -- or its "understandability". Today's designs are much more than just plugging in some text with pretty pictures. The whole design process is a culmination of customer direction, design creativity and time-consuming detailed development, documentation, testing and deployment. For most of today's companies obtaining a coherent application design and a web presence is not an option, it is a requirement.

Can you just buy "COTS" software (i.e. commercially available Off-the-Shelf software) as an alternative to an in-house developmentof specially designed software? The use of COTS to solve certain business problems can produce significant savings in procurement, development,and maintenance, but only for that certain problem. And, according to Dan Galorath in 'Software Reuse and Commercial Off-the-Shelf Software', COTS application software often satisfies less than 40 percent of the functionality of an application.

Software can be strung together to solve problems and it is. The difference is whether developing a whole new plan will contribute to the overall profit.

Designs fall into one of five  categories: Left to Right, Right to Left, Top-down, Bottom-up and Inside Out - and more often some mixture.

For instance the hardware is often already in place. The given hardware dictates the weakness and strengths of the network that connects the computers. In fact, anything that is already in place adds a Bottom-up component to the design. An EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) interface requires a certain output Right to Left style. Real time connection to market data requires input in Left to Right style. So unless you're building everything new, you will be faced with some amount of retrofitting. So being able to capture the way things work, or reverse engineering, will help.

All that being said, the only thing needed to create a high level design document is a text editor or a word processor and a way to incorporate diagrams. This high level design doesn't have to generate anything. In other words, 'some text with pretty pictures', is good enough to depict a design.