Quality Money Management : Process Engineering and Best Practices for Systematic Trading and Investment

193

Design System Architecture

CHAPTER ◆ 21

Software and hardware design are the activity of transforming requirements into the tech-

nologically feasible solutions and selecting optimal architectures. Design is a search for the

best technologies, the ones with attributes that will generate superior trading/investment

performance. Design must be documented either with team-specific notations, or more for-

mally with the Unified Modeling Language (UML) to view use cases, object models, and

other components.

Build and

document the

system

Check

performance

and probationary

trade

Plan and

document

technology

specifications

Implement

3

21 Design System Architecture

FIGURE 21-1

Unlike most software projects, in K | V the key business elements are already proto-

typed via Stages 1 and 2, and the key users have been involved in requirements gather-

ing since the fuzzy front end. In Stage 3, the software engineers are free to focus their

attention solely on technology design and not on requirements gathering. In this step, the

development team translates requirements into feasible, high-level design alternatives.

Good design practices will reduce development time, software errors, and bugs, as well

as minimize the need for additional resources for refactoring and fixes later on; ample

research proves that finding and fixing a software problem after delivery costs 100 times

more than finding and fixing the problem during design. Good design up front is impor-

tant because decisions may fix constraints for the life of the software, for example, the

choice of programming language.