Design

The design phase represents the real nitty-gritty of the project. It is here that you fully formulate all the aspects of the system in such a way that each step is well understood and translatable to technology. This phase includes any current manual steps. For example, you might have identified in your earlier analysis a step in which a person keys several columns ' worth of data from another computerized source into a separate tabular format for processing. The computerized version of this step might be to parse the data from the first source and then place it electronically into the second, saving an incredible amount of time.

It is important in the design phase that every element of the process has been identified, is well understood, and is now translated into the way that you see the new technology handling things. The end result of this effort is a document called the Systems Design Specification and will be used by system developers to create the new system.

The point is the same with the System Design Specification document. This doc is a blueprint, a set of lists, a how-to guide, and all of the other things that the folks developing the system will need to get started.

Getting Your Hands Dirty with SDLC-Design

In our little landscaping project, the landscape architect's blueprint would represent a part of your system design specification document, but you'd augment that documentation with things such as:

The kind of soil you'd use to prep the grounds before you lay down grass, including how many yards of dirt you'll require and how you'll till it into the existing ground.

The type of mulch you're going to use, where you'll put it, and how much you're going to need.

The type of blocks you'll utilize for the walkways, the amount of sand that you'll require as a base for the blocks, and the pattern that you'll create with them.

And so forth. The point here is that by the time you've gotten to this stage, you know an awful lot about how you're going to do things.

 

Note that the System Design Specification is not line-for-line code. That stuff is done by the developers writing the application programs that the system will utilize. But you could use a type of software application called Computer Aided Software Engineering (CASE) Tools that would allow you to develop the basic shell of the system by keying in business rules then hitting a button to tell the CASE software to write the underlying components of the code. CASE Tools are not used heavily in smaller application development environments, but in larger environments they're still a part of the framework that project teams use to make the job go more quickly. Additionally, CASE Tools can be used to help you organize and understand the project's requirements.

The Analysis phase of the SDLC closely maps to the Guide to the PMBOK's Planning process group .