Why is Low-Level Design Important?

Welcome again, before starting the topic let me ask a few questions that will be based on today’s topic.

 

Whenever we start developing any software products. Do you worry about the following issues?

1. Software maintenance: Software maintenance is one of the big concerns in the software development industry. If the coding pattern is not common then you are going to spend a lot of dollars on the team.

2. Memory management: We always face memory leakage issues and less control over object creation, behaviour and maintaining its state.

3. Code debugging: Whenever we just write code in our style to give a business solution. This is going to be challenging in the future for debugging the code.

4. Code management: By writing code anywhere can create lots of confusion and it can take time to re-understand the code.

Here LLD comes into the picture. It stands for Low-Level Design. Let’s understand what exactly LLD is.

Introduction of Low-Level design

Low-level design is part of system design. System design is divided into High level-design(HLD) and low level-design (LLD). LLD is a detailed design of the software system where a group of engineers discuss and define each entity of the system on a module basis and the relationship between entities. The low-level design gives us a broad-level architecture. So that if a business demands new features or process changes then we can do it quickly. It is also good for distributing work responsibilities. As we define each entity separately with respective relationships. We can give each entity to a developer for coding. It helps in managing software development. 

 

Few topics are required to fully work on low-level design such as class diagrams, object-oriented programming approaches, design patterns, solid principles, etc.

Object Oriented Programming Approach

The object-oriented programming approach is a paradigm of coding style. Object Oriented Programming is also known as OOP. Object-oriented programming is very useful to define any real-world entity in the programming world. OOP is all about three concepts such as polymorphism, Inheritance and encapsulation. This approach is useful to design a class diagram as well.

Design Patterns

Design patterns are the way of coding that represents the best practices to code. It solves daily life problems that occur in software development. It is the object-oriented programming-based approach that is used by experienced software developers. There are 26 design patterns which are classified into 3 categories such as creational design pattern, behavioural design pattern and lastly structural design pattern. 

 

As I said there are 26 design patterns, but it does not mean we will have to learn all of them. We will look into the most used design patterns. Still, there are a few design patterns which are popular and used by a maximum number of developers like singleton, factory, observer, builder, adapter, proxy, decorator, facade, chain of responsibility, and strategy.

SOLID Principles

The solid principles are five principles that are used to structure the class. It is again object-oriented programming approach-based techniques. Experienced software developers use these five principles and help to structure the code. Solid principles are a collection of five techniques:

  1. The Single Responsibility Principle

  2. The Open-Closed Principle

  3. The Liskov Substitution Principle

  4. The Interface Segregation Principle

  5. The Dependency Inversion Principle

Conclusion

Low-level design is an important skill set for every software developer. Developing software can be achievable for every software developer but developing scalable, low-maintenance and robust software is much needed for every engineer. 

 

It is a good practice to design modules on paper before jumping into code and it helps to have an idea of where our development process is going.

 

References :

https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/what-is-low-level-design-or-lld-learn-system-design/