Requirements VS Design

You may be asking yourself; "What is the difference between Requirements and Design?". Good Question. The answer is relative. Requirements are always statements about the boundary of a system. Design is about the internal parts. Or, requirements are concerned with "what" a system should do and design is about "how" the system does it.


But as you move inside a system you see new boundaries and new parts. So as they say one mans design is another mans requirements.

One person or group designs a system leaving all its internal parts to be designed by others. The part designers receive requirements from the system designer. So requirements and designs are dependent on the scope of the component you are looking at.

You could hand off a requirements document to a general contractor who would ship part of the document to a subcontractor responsible for a part of a system who would immediately begin requirements analysis of his part then partition its parts to his developers for design. Depending on the scope of a product this could repeat several times. In general it is a naturally recursive process where the design at an outer level is the requirements for the next level.

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