Ugh - the term "preliminary design" should be retired!=20
Any large size project that needs to be maintained over many years needs = some high level design material (hopefully with some diagrams) to help newb= ies , system level test folks and other stakeholders to understand what the= system is about. A small subset of the UML diagrams can help with this end= eavor even if you are not generating code. Some of the diagrams created dur= ing design will be low level and these will end up in the dust-bin which is= probably OK. For those a picture of the whiteboard is probably good enough= .
I am not keen on using propriety tool notations for anything. Anyone still using the original "Software through Pictures" diagrams?
some high level design material (hopefully with some diagrams) to help newbies , system level test folks and other stakeholders to understand what the system is about. A small subset of the UML diagrams can help with this endeavor even if you are not generating code. Some of the diagrams created during design will be low level and these will end up in the dust-bin which is probably OK. For those a picture of the whiteboard is probably good enough.
For me a tool should provide code generation capabilities, otherwise you ever have the problem of updating manually the diagrams when you modify the code, which is usually not done.
Statecharts can be used to generate code and are a good way of structuring the program. With hierarchical statecharts, you can design at a high level and progress toward the code in a seamless way.
some high level design material (hopefully with some diagrams) to help newbies , system level test folks and other stakeholders to understand what the system is about. A small subset of the UML diagrams can help with this endeavor even if you are not generating code. Some of the diagrams created during design will be low level and these will end up in the dust-bin which is probably OK. For those a picture of the whiteboard is probably good enough.
I am looking for tools automating the design and generation of embedded systems. So far I could find this one that is freely available:
"Concretely, and from the end user point of view, TASTE consists in two graphical editors that allow to capture the logical architecture of a computer-based system and its deployment on hardware components, and a set of model analyzers and code generators that process user input to verify and glue all software components together.
The TASTE process encourages a combined use of modeling and coding languages depending on the nature of the function ? the toolset is then responsible for making them talk together at runtime : this is the heart of the TASTE technology. It is for example strongly encouraged to model embedded systems as a combination of state machines and control laws, because this is often what they are. Following this logic,take the best language for state machines (SDL), the one your scientist knows best for the mathematical models (SCADE or Simulink) and let TASTE fix interfaces at code level so that the SDL-generated code can transparently communicate with SCADE or Simulink-generated code. Of course, if you need to develop low-level functions to pilot a peripheral (sensor or actuator), use C or Ada."
For software intensive systems, It smacks of the water-fall life-cycle whic= h only works for the smallest of projects such as those done by students.= =20
It is much better to use "high-level design", "conceptual design" and/or "= architectural design" since they are describing it at an abstraction level = not at a time-phase.
Therefore, for a medium to large project, once the team has a clue of what = the system is about they need to start building it (select appropriate life=
-cycle as needed).
The term "Detailed design" is still useful because it adheres to abstractio= n level (of course unless you are model based then that could be captured w= ith code).
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