Posts

Showing posts with the label Software Development Planning

How to write a good software design doc

Image
As a software engineer, I spend a lot of time reading and writing design documents. After having gone through hundreds of these docs, I’ve seen first hand a strong correlation between good design docs and the ultimate success of the project. This article is my attempt at describing  what makes a design document great . The article is split into 4 sections: ·          Why  write a design document ·          What  to include in a design document ·          How  to write it ·          The  process  around it Why write a design document? A design doc — also known as a technical spec — is a description of how you plan to solve a problem. There are  lots of writings  already on why it’s important to write a design doc before diving into coding. So all I’ll say here is: A design doc is the most useful tool for making sure the right work gets done. The main goal of a design doc is to make you more effective by forcing you to think through the design and gather fee