A little while back, DevShed posted a new article that started their "The Art of Software Development" series off with a good, solid base. This morning, they've posted the second article in the series, "Designing for Simplicity".

In the first part of this article, I introduced you to the five phases of a software development project, and spent some time on the first phase, requirements analysis. With that first phase out of the way, it's time to move on to what I personally find to be the most challenging phase of any software project: design. This is when you meditate on the requirements defined previously and design the architecture of your application so that it satisfies all of them, while simultaneously meeting the goals of stability, security, performance and maintainability.

Software design is one of the more overlooked things in the online world these days - it's just easier to prototype something out and work from there than it is to "plan" it all out right. It's not an easy mix: stability, functionality, security, and performance. Those of you out there that have design larger scale projects know what I mean. It just always seems to turn out better if the plan is followed...