Application Design Fundamentals

Methodologies for good computer application design were first devised in the 1960s by recognized industry consultants such as James Martin, Edward Yourdon, and Larry Constantine. At the dawn of modern computing, building an application or fixing a broken one was so expensive that the experts often advised spending 60 percent or more of the total project time getting the design right before writing a single line of code.

Today’s application development technologies make building an application much cheaper and quicker. In fact, the pace of computing is several orders of magnitude faster than it was just a decade ago. An experienced user can sit down with Microsoft Access on a PC and build in an afternoon what took months to create on an early mainframe system (if it was even possible).