Which of the following uses top-down approach and is applied on single entity?

13.4.2 Characteristics of Top-Down Design

Top-down design can be perceived as visionary. Because top-down designs are not constrained by current work practice, they can turn out startlingly different and even futuristic designs, which shows how top-down design can be visionary.

Top-down design is heavily driven by domain knowledge. Designers need extensive domain knowledge to be able to abstract the nature of work in that domain. This usually translates to the need for designers to envision multiple work activity instances in that domain.

Being a potential user in the domain is good for a designer. An important factor in the success of Apple designers practicing top-down design is the fact that they could see themselves as users of the iPod and iPad, etc.

Another example of a domain in which designers can see themselves as users is photography. To design a photo editing and management application, it would help, perhaps even be essential, for designers to be experts in photography and even avid users of such a product, which would help with immersion necessary to be able to creatively think about the problem.

During the design and development of new products, designers and engineers rely on both a bottom-up and top-down approach. The bottom-up approach is being utilized when off-the-shelf or existing components are selected and integrated into the product. An example would include selecting a particular fastener, such as a bolt, and designing the receiving components such that the fastener will fit properly. In a top-down approach, a custom fastener would be designed such that it would fit properly in the receiving components.[2] For perspective, for a product with more restrictive requirements [such as weight, geometry, safety, environment, etc.], such as a space-suit, a more top-down approach is taken and almost everything is custom designed.

Software developmentEdit

In the software development process, the top-down and bottom-up approaches play a key role.

Top-down approaches emphasize planning and a complete understanding of the system. It is inherent that no coding can begin until a sufficient level of detail has been reached in the design of at least some part of the system. Top-down approaches are implemented by attaching the stubs in place of the module. This, however, delays testing of the ultimate functional units of a system until significant design is complete.

Bottom-up emphasizes coding and early testing, which can begin as soon as the first module has been specified. This approach, however, runs the risk that modules may be coded without having a clear idea of how they link to other parts of the system, and that such linking may not be as easy as first thought. Re-usability of code is one of the main benefits of the bottom-up approach.[3]

Top-down design was promoted in the 1970s by IBM researchers Harlan Mills and Niklaus Wirth. Mills developed structured programming concepts for practical use and tested them in a 1969 project to automate the New York Times morgue index. The engineering and management success of this project led to the spread of the top-down approach through IBM and the rest of the computer industry. Among other achievements, Niklaus Wirth, the developer of Pascal programming language, wrote the influential paper Program Development by Stepwise Refinement. Since Niklaus Wirth went on to develop languages such as Modula and Oberon [where one could define a module before knowing about the entire program specification], one can infer that top-down programming was not strictly what he promoted. Top-down methods were favored in software engineering until the late 1980s,[3] and object-oriented programming assisted in demonstrating the idea that both aspects of top-down and bottom-up programming could be utilized.

Modern software design approaches usually combine both top-down and bottom-up approaches. Although an understanding of the complete system is usually considered necessary for good design, leading theoretically to a top-down approach, most software projects attempt to make use of existing code to some degree. Pre-existing modules give designs a bottom-up flavor. Some design approaches also use an approach where a partially functional system is designed and coded to completion, and this system is then expanded to fulfill all the requirements for the project.

ProgrammingEdit

Building blocks are an example of bottom-up design because the parts are first created and then assembled without regard to how the parts will work in the assembly.

Top-down is a programming style, the mainstay of traditional procedural languages, in which design begins by specifying complex pieces and then dividing them into successively smaller pieces. The technique for writing a program using top–down methods is to write a main procedure that names all the major functions it will need. Later, the programming team looks at the requirements of each of those functions and the process is repeated. These compartmentalized sub-routines eventually will perform actions so simple they can be easily and concisely coded. When all the various sub-routines have been coded the program is ready for testing. By defining how the application comes together at a high level, lower level work can be self-contained. By defining how the lower level abstractions are expected to integrate into higher level ones, interfaces become clearly defined.

In a bottom-up approach, the individual base elements of the system are first specified in great detail. These elements are then linked together to form larger subsystems, which then in turn are linked, sometimes in many levels, until a complete top-level system is formed. This strategy often resembles a "seed" model, by which the beginnings are small, but eventually grow in complexity and completeness. Object-oriented programming [OOP] is a paradigm that uses "objects" to design applications and computer programs. In mechanical engineering with software programs such as Pro/ENGINEER, Solidworks, and Autodesk Inventor users can design products as pieces not part of the whole and later add those pieces together to form assemblies like building with Lego. Engineers call this piece part design.

In a bottom-up approach, good intuition is necessary to decide the functionality that is to be provided by the module. If a system is to be built from an existing system, this approach is more suitable as it starts from some existing modules.

Parsing is the process of analyzing an input sequence [such as that read from a file or a keyboard] in order to determine its grammatical structure. This method is used in the analysis of both natural languages and computer languages, as in a compiler.

Bottom-up parsing is a strategy for analyzing unknown data relationships that attempts to identify the most fundamental units first, and then to infer higher-order structures from them. Top-down parsers, on the other hand, hypothesize general parse tree structures and then consider whether the known fundamental structures are compatible with the hypothesis. See Top-down parsing and Bottom-up parsing.