The Engineering Design - How should you approach writing your first Engineering Design?

Engineering Designs are the first professional artifact you will likely write, so how do you write one?

Gurez, Kashmir

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As you start to think about your first project, one of the best ways to gather your thoughts and collect feedback is to author an Engineering Design. In the Tech Industry, writing Engineering Designs is a standard practice that all Software Engineers are expected to master. This comprehensive document translates the Business Requirements, usually defined by your Product Manager, into an executable Engineering Plan, that anybody old follow and write the Software. So, what are some of the things to consider as you begin writing your first Engineering Design? Let’s dive in and understand the best practices for Software Engineering Designs.

Back at my internship, during the second week, after getting set up and getting to know a few people, I started to understand the project requirements and how to go about translating them into Software. This is when Matt introduced me to the concept of Engineering Designs and how the Project team used them to create in depth Engineering plans for all the components of the Architecture. Matt introduced me to a SharePoint Document Library that had a list of dozens of Engineering Designs written by different engineers of the Project Team over many years. I started to browse through this huge volume of designs and began to familiarize myself with the areas of the Project Server Architecture that I was going to be implementing my features in.

While going through the different designs, I noticed all of them were using the same template. Matt gave me instructions to use the same template as was used by other Engineering Designs to author the details of my project. I got up to speed and quickly started producing one of my first Engineering Designs, about the changes I was going to propose for the Datasets used by the Portfolio Modeler feature. I followed the template closely and used the instructions given in each section to provide as much details as I could about my feature design. I also used the Visual Studio’s DataSet Visualizer to capture images about the Schema of my DataSet design and added them to the Engineering Design to make the reader understand the proposed changes.

The Project Team had a great culture of writing Engineering Designs. As a newcomer to the team, I could instantly connect with the details about the Architecture of Project Server and author the incremental changes that would enable me to implement my features. Additionally, having a standardized Engineering Design template removed a lot of ambiguity around what the team considered important when describing their engineering designs.

Tip #1: Before you start writing Code, spend time creating an Engineering Design for your project. If your team uses a standardized template, use it to capture the essential details of your proposed Architecture.

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