Design Instructions

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How to Write a Design Document
Overview
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Be sure to read through this entire page. It's all relevent.
Each design document is worth 33.33% of the project. While it will likely take
less than 33.33% of the time you spend on the project, you should take it very
seriously.
We will grade your designs harshly. The design is essentially the most
important part of the project. Having a good project design can literally cut
your total coding time by a factor of 10.
Design documents should be around 2,000 to 4,000 words long. If it's longer
than 5,000 words, we won't read it. So keep them short and to the point.
Design documents will be submitted to the project server
(klwin00.ucmerced.edu) in PDF format. We encourage you to use your
favorite word processor to make your design document, but you must convert it
to PDF when you're done.

What goes into a design document?
A design document is a complete high-level solution to the problem presented. It
should be detailed enough that somebody who already understands the problem could
go out and code the project without having to make any significant decisions. Further,
if this somebody happens to be an experienced coder, they should be able to use the
design document to code the solution in a few hours (not necessarily including
debugging).
So, what actually goes in?
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A high-level description of your solution, including design decisions and data
structures
Declarations for all new classes, procedures, and global/class variables
Descriptions of all new procedures (unless you can tell exactly what it does
from the name), including the purpose of the procedure, and an explanation of
how it works and/or pseudocode

For example, this is the pseudocode one would write for the
existing Condition::Wait:

void Condition::Wait()
waiter = new Semaphore, initially 0
append waiter to waitQueue
conditionLock->Release()
waiter->P()
conditionLock->Acquire()
Your pseudocode has to be precise. For instance, in describing your solution for
the Communicator class, it is not enough to say
if anybody's waiting, then signal cv
You need to say how you determine if anybody's waiting, e.g. by saying
if (waitingReceivers>0 or waitingSenders>0) then signal
cv
Also, another important thing to remember is that a design document needs to include
the correctness invariants and testing strategy. The testing strategy includes a clear
plan of the testing methodology and may include a description of test cases that will
be used to test correctness invariants. Focus on the testing strategy. If you want, you
may itemize things that will need testing.

What doesn't go into a design document?
Keep in mind that your TA understands the project very well. Do not restate the
problem in your design document. Your TA is far more interested in your solution
than in knowing that you understood the problem.
Your design document should contain very little actual code, if any at all. Include
psuedocode for all complex procedures, but do not include Java code.
The purpose of pseudocode is to avoid all the annoying aspects of programming
languages that make code both harder to write and harder to read. The purpose of
pseudocode is not to be imprecise about how you solve a problem. Comments are
welcome, but ASSERT and DEBUG statements, for example, do not belong in
pseudocode.
Remember that we have to read your design documents. If you don't think we want to
see it, don't put it in!
Be sure to make sure your .pdf file works before you turn it in (try viewing it
with gs, gsview, Preview, acroread, etc.).



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