TABLE OF CONTENTS This isn t a specialist book about design, and a lot will depend on the tools and technology you re working with. However, I can give you a few basic principles. Over the next few pages, I introduce a number of powerful ideas to help develop and improve your design.
There are lots of good sources of more specific design guidance. Use them!
Colleagues and friends who ve used the environment before
Specialist books and magazines
User groups and newsgroups
Training courses and seminars run by the tool vendors
Standards and guidelines introduced by tool vendors or standards bodies
Vendor support programmes and knowledge bases
A good design is usually simple and elegant , with a clear structure and few rules to remember. The trick is to look for patterns which may imply an underlying structure. These can sometimes be missed or hidden by an analysis using the users terminology.
As an example, I worked with someone who was designing a control system for a railway marshalling yard. The users talked about three different types of track section, and four different sorts of points, using different words for each. At the review, we realised that we could model this as track sections , points plus some typing information. We redrew the analysis in this form, and ended up with a very simple design as a result.
Simple is not the...
