What is Design Engineering? What are different design concepts?

Design engineering focuses on the creation of a representation or model that are concentrated on architecture of the software, data structures, interfaces and components that are necessary to implement the software.

The design process is an iterative process of refinement, i.e.from a higher level of abstraction to lower levels of abstraction. The design should implement both explicit and implicit requirements. It should be readable and understandable. It provides an over-all illustration of the software from the perspective of the data, function and behavior.

Design concepts provides the software engineer a foundation from which design methods can be applied. These concepts include:
- Abstractions: Software engineers different levels of abstractions as we design the blueprint of the software. Two types of abstraction called data and procedural abstractions are defined.
- Modularity: It leads to information hiding and encourages functional independence.
- Coupling: It is the degree of interconnectedness between design objects. Two types of coupling are used: Interaction and Inheritance Coupling.
- Cohesion: It is the measure to which an element contributes to a single purpose.
- Refinement: Abstraction complements refinement as they enable a software engineer to specify the behavior and data of a class or module yet suppressing low levels of detail.
- Refactoring: It simplifies the design of the component without changing its function and behavior.

The work product of the design engineering phase is the design model which consists of the architectural design, data design, interface design and component-level design and deployment level design.