In Today’s episode, we are going to cover Design Documents. I recently had a number of coaching sessions where design documents were discussed. I then attempted to remember how I learned about all of the Design Documents that I have seen, written, and peer reviewed over my career, but I couldn’t find a good answer other than experience. Well today we are going to shed some light on what I would call the most common Design Documents our there. Lets get started.
Design Documents – Agenda
Customer Requirements Document (CRD)
Reference Architecture (RA)
High Level Design (HLD)
Low Level Design (LLD)
Design Documents – CRD
Customer Requirements Documents
Undervalued and skipped
Built together with the customer and the Designer
Illicit information from customer, thats our role as a Designer
Design Documents – RA
Reference Architectures
Abstraction of an Architecture in a perfect world situation
Sometimes you will see a HLD, a LLD, and a mix of these together. Its not always end to end though and fully inclusive. Its more like here is the 85% solution in a perfect world. Now you as a Design need to apply this reference architecture within the environment you are working on with the associated requirements.
Design Documents – HLD
High Level Design
Specific to an environment
Apply information from CRD and associated Reference architectures to build out the HLD
Example??
You need a router here, a Firewall there, and some sort of transport connecting everything together.
Things like Single points of failure, dual points of failure, and , shared fate would be discussed and ruled out
Design specific decisions are highlighted and discussed. For example, this document would discuss decisions around MPLS BGP Route Reflect Design. Cold potato and hot potato routing. If there should be dedicated RRs for IP address-families versus VPN address-families, or should they be mingled on the same set of BGP RRs. More importantly, it would discuss the pros and cons to each of these design decisions.
You could also see an As-Built version of this as well, where someone documented in an HLD formation what the current environment is.
What you will not find here, is the actually configuration of features and devices. This aligns perfectly with the next design document, the LLD
Design Documents – LLD
Low Level Design
The Low Level Design Document, or LLD is where all of the technical configurations of features, devices, and all of those nerd knobs you want to use is going to be.
Some times called Detail Design Documents. There are also As-Built versions of these as well depending on who is creating the documents.
Work with me:
Through your participation in a healthy mentoring and coaching relationship, you will benefit greatly from the education, the experiences, the influences, leadership and even the resources provided. Learn how you can accomplish more, in one year, than you could accomplish in your career…in your business…and in your life.
Accomplish More Now!!
Provide Feedback
You can leave a comment on the blog!
You can leave a voicemail at (617) 913-4103
You can email us at Feedback@zigbits.tech
Transparency:
This post may contain affiliate links to products or services were I may receive a level of compensation from your actions by following those links. This is seamless to you and does not add any additional cost to the products or services in question. In addition, I do not let any affiliate relationship cloud my judgement or my recommendation of a product or service. My recommendations will always be above reproach. This is my commitment to you Ziglets!
The post ZNDP 039 – Design Documents appeared first on Zigbits - Where Zigabytes are faster than Gigabytes.
