7.6 Software Architecture Document | A Software Engineering Approach to LabVIEW

This document will describe how the software will be built. Here you'll include feasibility examples, database designs, architecture designs, test specifications, file examples, prototypes , and more. All the effort here will be to achieve as full a description of the system as possible, without actually writing it. These are our plans for construction.

This activity can take a long time, depending on how much content you put into it. This is one of those areas where trial and error will come into play. We have seen projects where a whole rain forest has been used to print the architecture document of the system, only for it to be filed away for years in a drawer . Other times it can be just a sketch on a cigarette package, telling anyone looking at it little about the how the system was designed.

For us, the main purpose of this document is to detail the design decisions we made. Going through the process of designing the system should raise more problems and issues that need addressing, giving you a chance to make decisions or investigate alternatives. It should also give you a clear plan for construction, detailing the individual components , what their purpose is, and how they communicate. This is also the place to document issues that can prove to be rather gray, like behavior. For instance, we have covered state machines, but sometimes their states can be complex. To decide how they should interact needs work, and that work should be done and documented here.

We also do LCOD design in this document. We utilize all we have learned, and use it to design the system. We derive the components that we will use to build the system, including everything we discussed in Chapter 4: top-down, bottom-up, and OOD. Everything that helps us take the problem and dissect it into a solution.

So we would expect to see:

Flowcharts
State transition diagrams
Schematics
Relational database design
Files and a definition of their layouts
Components and a definition of their interactions
Pictures of User Interfaces

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