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Mik Seljamaa ๐Ÿ‡ช๐Ÿ‡ช
Mik Seljamaa ๐Ÿ‡ช๐Ÿ‡ช

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Detailed Design Document

The DDD is a message in a bottle. It tells the reader about how the original author planned the implementation so that the code is intelligible. The detail of exposition must take over where the ADD leaves off, and take the reader to the point where the code can stand for itself. Sometimes, this explanation can be assisted by pseudo-code, but this need not be the case. The DDD should be regarded as amendable. During implementation, design details like the organization of code into modules will emerge. If these details are not captured for our colleagues in the DDD, where will they be captured? This simple omission causes far too much unnecessary trouble, as engineers pick up parts of systems that they can see is well documented, if only they knew where to start! Your final DDD should tell your successor whatever they need to know in order to pick up the system and change it.
Test Plan

A test is the most context-sensitive of the document types, but the following observations are useful guides within the imperatives of the situation. The test strategy aims to stress the system. It will not get much leverage out of doing this entirely at random, so the issue is to find one or more models of the system, that can give us an indication of likely typical and stress conditions. A useful structure is, therefore, to describe the model, derive the stress conditions, and then list them.

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