A Guide to Software Design Documents and Design Reviews

If you’re a new software engineer (or maybe even if you aren’t), you might dread design docs, and you might even despise those asking for them. The first time I was asked to write one, I had no idea why, or any idea what to put in it. I pieced it from a couple other design docs I found in my company’s wiki hoping it would satisfy my manager’s request. Good enough! But the next few documents after that presented merely a marginal improvement on this shaky foundation, and the initial dread never really went away. Then I joined a team that had a template for their…