Writing Design Documents

Once you have created a requirements specification document, you will have to decide whether to write a design document. Often it is not necessary, especially when a few people are working on a small project. You may wish to choose key elements of a complete design document and develop them to the point of usefulness.

The first part of design is concerned with the architecture of the system. The system should be broken into sections that encompass broad groups of functionality. A Web application for project management might break down into a module that handles project information, a module that handles users, and a module that handles timesheet entries. An informational Web site can be broken down by the secondary pages—that ...

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