Integrated design

Abstract

Matters of design, analysis and documentation of a Programming System are frequently ordered sequentially in time and distributed over independent groups of people. It is argued that, instead, these three aspects should be integrated into one production effort in which documentation is the primary issue. The language that is used for implementation must not dominate the description of the system because a system should not be defined and understood in terms of its implementation. Using such a language throughout documentation and design is on the one hand too restrictive because the language is bound to lack expressive power, but on the other hand it is too demanding because it forces to go into details that may be irrelevant for a description at hand.