Importance of good software design

The right electronic design software improves efficiency and reliability. Choosing the wrong electronic design software can be extremely painful. Every PCB design software is capable of routing, but that does not mean that they all perform equally well. It may take a few more clicks to complete a trace when it could be done with less on another superior program. That may not sound like a lot of time on its own, but when you think of this inefficiency compounded over the vast quantity of nets in a modern design, it suddenly becomes a significant waste of time.

For example, you can shove existing traces and vias aside when drawing a new trace. Or you can make the trace go around existing obstacles. Circuit designers would prefer ready-built models for common components with the flexibility of various configurations. The same goes for design components, which can be a real time-waster to create if they are not available in the default libraries. Paid electronic design software provides superior functionalities. Unlike Canva, premium electronic design software is more expensive.

This may cause some designers to consider getting free electronic design software, as there are dozens available. However, are the savings of opting for free electronic design software worth it in the long run?

It is undeniable that free electronic design software boasts many of the features the paid ones do. Schematic designs , PCB layouts, routing, and component libraries are often standard features of the free software.

But, when push comes to shove, paid software is far superior in terms of the user interface, depth, and functionality. For example, 3D rendering is more refined in paid electronic design software. Cadence PCB solutions is a complete front to back design tool to enable fast and efficient product creation. Cadence enables users accurately shorten design cycles to hand off to manufacturing through modern, IPC industry standard.

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The Importance of Good Software Architecture. Like 3. Join the DZone community and get the full member experience. Join For Free. What Is Software Architecture? Why Is Software Architecture Important? A Basis for Communication Software architecture is a sort of plan of the system and is primordial for the understanding, the negotiation, and the communication between all the stakeholders user-side, customer, management, etc.

The Earliest Decisions The first decisions are made at this stage. Transferability of the Model Software architecture defines the model of the software and how it will function. What Is a Good Software Architecture? For example: The software architecture should be strong and easy to maintain when we find bugs. We should have domain concepts that nearly all the members will understand.

It should be flexible, extensible, and usable on the long term. You should make it possible to adapt to requirements. You need high-capacity scalability. You can spot straight away from the design how much a bug fix or introduction of a new feature will change the existing code base.

As good design should also show interactions between software components and their interfaces, it will also reveal possible effects of changing code in another component that depends on the one needing the change.

Working especially with old code bases that do not have any software design can be very painful and cause many unexpected bugs. When doing the design I have noticed a lot of unnecessary interfaces that are not actually needed and not requested by the customer. While this kind of things can easily be found from the code, usually no one pays attention to the extra functionality.

Extra functionality means extra maintaining, testing and development. No one really wants that so one should keep it simple and do what needs to be done, nothing more. This means the design should tell how your system works internally and how it uses resources such as threads, database connections and other things that might make a hit to the performance.

Also it does not bring any extra value to the developers nor the customers who might see your software design in a form or another. By including dependencies to other software modules, such as 3rd party libraries, in to your design makes the software much easier to port into another environment. Having these documented in a single place makes it super easy to discover what needs to be changed if using another environment or if it can be done at all. Yet again you might not want to design all function calls to 3rd party software as updating the version or changing the underlaying library would mean total redesign.

Generating a design document for your customers from the software design is a good idea. It provides them an overview how the software they are about to take into use works. You might need to consider if you want to publish only your public interfaces and leave your internal design out of the document as good design makes it possible to very easily write the software from scratch.

The design also works as a great starting point for new-comers.