question about preliminary design and detailed design

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hi，all

Recently, my work is to write preliminary design and detailed design documents of a new system. And our company does not have the standard of what content should be in the preliminary design document and what content should be in the detailed design.

What i know about preliminary design is:
1 analyse the requirement document,give some modules.
2 define the module's responsibility to fulfill the requirement.
3 describe the relationship between modules.

so,
I need some advices about this,and some link will be appreciated.

Posted 1-Jan-12 16:37pm

sesha Fan

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Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov · Answer 1 · 2012-01-01T17:00:00

The classification of design into "preliminary" and "detailed" design looks pretty much artificial and immature.

It is not clear how you place these two steps in the general states of development. The keys to development method is to make it iterative and incremental, which requires considerable experience, not matter how much do you know about methods described in books. All your steps may need more than one iteration, not just "preliminary" and "detailed"; besides, different activities are involved in iterations. In such methods, the stages are usually inception, construction, elaboration and transition. All activities are iterated in all those stages albeit in different extent.

You can get some basic ideas on the processes and methods:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iterative_and_incremental_development[^],
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Process[^],
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_Unified_Process[^].

I would advise you to get the ideas but not get them too seriously. In my strong opinion, the books on those methods are filled with some mixture of thoughts based on serious experience with good deal of science-like pseudo-science, in different proportions, depending on authors. Naturally, the authors pretend that their methods are more universal then they really are.

A really good method can use the ideas brought by other developers, but always viewed through the prism of your company's ultimate goals. There is no a silver bullet.

—SA