Process-Oriented Design

The goal of design is to map the application's requirements to a hardware and software environment. The result of process-oriented analysis – data flow diagrams, data dictionary entities, and so on – is translated into detailed specifications for hardware and software. The main output of process-oriented design includes structure charts, physical databases, and program specifications.

In this chapter, you will learn about the concepts and terminologies for process-oriented design and the steps of process-oriented design, including transaction analysis, transform analysis and structure charts, physical database design, program packages, and program design. You will also learn about the strengths and weaknesses of process-oriented design.

Introduction

Structured design is the art of designing system components and the interrelationships between those components in the best possible way to solve some well specified problem. The main goal of design is to map the functional requirements of the application to a hardware and software environment. The results of structured design are programming specifications and plans for testing, conversion, training, and installation. In addition, the design may result in proto typing part or all of the application. This section discusses the mapping process and the development of program specifications. The other topics are discussed in Chapter 14. 

The goals of structured design, as first documented by Yourdon and Constantine [1979], have not changed much over the years. They are to minimize cost of development and maintenance. We can minimize the cost of development by keeping parts manageably small and separately solvable. We can minimize the cost of maintenance by keeping parts manageably small and separately correctable. In design we determine the smallest solvable parts as a way of managing application complexity.

Source: Adapted from Sue Conger, https://resources.saylor.org/CS/CS302/OER/The_New_Software_Engineering.pdf
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