CS711 Software Design

CS711: Software Design

CS711 Software Design is an advanced course that focuses on the critical, non-coding phase of software development: creating the high-level architecture and low-level design for a software system. While earlier courses teach you how to code, this course teaches you what to code. It's about making the crucial structural decisions that determine a system's quality, maintainability, performance, and long-term success. A good design makes a system easy to build, test, and evolve; a bad design leads to a "big ball of mud" that is costly and difficult to maintain.

This course moves beyond the implementation of individual algorithms and data structures to focus on the large-scale organization of software. You will learn how to break down a complex problem into manageable components (modules, classes, services) and define the relationships and interfaces between them. The course heavily emphasizes Design Patterns and architectural styles.

Key Topics Covered:

• Software Design Principles: Deepening the understanding of core principles like abstraction, encapsulation, modularity, and information hiding. Introduction to SOLID principles (Single Responsibility, Open/Closed, Liskov Substitution, Interface Segregation, Dependency Inversion).
• Design Patterns: A major focus of the course. You will study the "Gang of Four" (GoF) design patterns, which are reusable, proven solutions to common software design problems.
  • Creational Patterns: (e.g., Singleton, Factory, Builder) - Concerned with object creation mechanisms.
  • Structural Patterns: (e.g., Adapter, Decorator, Facade) - Concerned with object composition and relationships.
  • Behavioral Patterns: (e.g., Observer, Strategy, Command) - Concerned with communication and responsibility between objects.
• Software Architecture: Exploring high-level structural choices. This includes common architectural patterns like Layered Architecture, Model-View-Controller (MVC), Client-Server, and Microservices.
• Design Modeling: Using the Unified Modeling Language (UML) to visualize, specify, and document software designs. This includes Class Diagrams, Sequence Diagrams, and Use Case Diagrams.
• Software Quality Attributes: Designing for non-functional requirements, such as maintainability, performance, scalability, reliability, and security.

Course Objectives:

1. Understand and apply core software design principles (SOLID) to create clean, maintainable code.
2. Identify and implement appropriate "Gang of Four" design patterns to solve common problems.
3. Analyze and compare different software architectural styles (e.g., MVC, Microservices).
4. Create clear and detailed software design documentation using UML diagrams.
5. Make informed design decisions that trade off between various quality attributes.

CS711 is a capstone course for aspiring software architects and senior developers. It provides the essential knowledge to lead the technical design of complex, robust, and scalable software systems.