IEEE 1016-1998

This is a Recommended Practice for describing software designs. It produces the necessary information content and recommended organization for a Software Design Description. A software design description is a representation of a software system that is used as medium for communicating software design information. The practice may be applied to commercial, scientific or military software which runs on any digital computer. Applicability is not restricted by the size of the the software. This practice is not limited to specific methodologies for design, configuration management, or quality assurance. It is assumed that the quality of design information and changes to the design description will be managed by other project activities. Finally, this document does not support and is not limited to any particular description techniques. It may be applied to proper documents, automated databases, design description languages, or other means of description. In addition it will also establish a correlation between the content of software design descriptions as defined in 1016 and the content of such documents as defined in IEEE 12207.1, Guide for Information Technology - Software Life Cycle Processes - Life Cycle Data by adding an annex which will correlate the assumptions relating to content of the two documents and trace content between subject documentation

To achieve harmonization of the content definition for software life cycle process results among the IEEE software engineering standards and with related international standards. This will help users to produce results consistent with the international standard for software life cycle processes, ISO/IEC 12207.

Revision Standard - Superseded. This IEEE Standards product is part of the family on Software Engineering. The necessary information content and recommendations for an organization for Software Design Descriptions (SDDs) are described. An SDD is a representation of a software system that is used as a medium for communicating software design information. This recommended practice is applicable to paper documents, automated databases, design description languages, or other means of description.