This article looks into the two major approaches of software design in software engineering. From these approaches have rooted out all the modern and advanced software design strategies and practices.

A good software design allows you to program your software development modules in an organized and efficient manner. The techniques that come attached to these software design approaches assist developers throughout the process.

Choosing the right software design is crucial for smooth development and implementation phases. It makes it easier to cater to the complexity of programs and come up with the plausible solutions, especially for the outsourcing teams where multiple professionals are working on a single project.

Considerable efforts towards picking the right software design approach have helped grant software development outsourcing key success in the 2020 epidemic.

Here are the two basic software design approaches used in custom software development:

Bottom-Up Approach

This software design approach caters to project components and objects present at the lowest level. These smaller components help create the next high-level components. The process continues until all the components come together to reach the end product. That's how you get a complete software.

Simply put, the bottom-up approach is designing the software development from the lowest to the highest level. It gives you a chain of processes, making it easier and efficient to follow through and ensuring success.

Bottom-up approach is suitable when:

• You have basic information available for the project
• The team wants to use some general software constructs and practices
• You want to cover details of software development and implementation at the lowest level

Bottom-up approach is not suitable when:

• It does not coordinate with the structure of software requirements
• There is less time to construct bottom-up solutions

Top-Down Approach

Top-down approach stands contrary to bottom-up approach. The software engineers start breaking a project from the highest levels to the lowest level, determining smaller components at each level. It gives you a hierarchal structure. As the product breaks into smaller components, software developers end up with a chain to follow down.

Each sub-component is treated as an individual entity and is dealt with according to the project requirements. The process continues until you reach the lowest level of the product.

The design starts with a single definition, but then you keep on including further definitions of each sub-component. Combining all the definitions gives a complete system.

Top-down approach is suitable when:

• Software needs to be constructed from the ground level
• You need to make a responsive and flexible design
• You need to focus on the requirements strictly

Top-down approach is not suitable when:

• You do not need an application-specific features and design
• You are looking for a rather simple architecture

Final Thoughts

Are you wondering what the future of software development looks like? It is all about choosing the right software design and integrate it with the top-notch technologies to develop the best product, as per client requirements.

Custom software development firms also use a hybrid approach that comes as a combination of bottom-up and top-down approach, allowing agile software development.