- Step 1: Requirements clarification: Always ask a question to find the exact scope of the problem you are solving
- Step 2: System interface definition: Define what APIs are expected from the system. This will also ensure you haven't gotten any requirement wrong.
- Step 3: Back-of-the-envelope estimation: Also called the Fermi problem, it's good to always have a good estimate on the scale of thes system you are going to design
- Step 4: Define data model: This helps you decide on how data are partitioned.
- Step 5: High-level design: Block diagrams to represent core components of the system.
- Step 6: Detailed component design: Dig deeper into 2-3 components
- Step 7: Bottlenecks: Try to discuss as many bottlenecks as possible - and find ways to mitigate them. Note that sometimes it is impossible to mitigate them, so you need to understand what is the tradeoff of the approach you choose.
According to wiki, the process of defining, maintaining and documenting requirements is called requirements engineering. To simplify things, we focus on gathering functional and non-functional requirements. We use the shortform FR for functional requirements and NFR for non-functional requirements:
Here's the difference:
- FR define what a system is supposed to do, NFR how a system is supposed to be.
- FR "system shall do ", NFR "system shall be "