High Level Design

After the requirements definition the high level design is the most important document and provides the blueprint for the further stages of a project including the detailed design and implementation stages. By not getting the high level design right, organisations run the risk of creating problems which could be extremely expensive to remedy at a later stage.

Logical Architecture

The high level design (HLD) looks at the overall architecture logically, defining the services which will be required to implement the solution. So for a VDI solution, the high level design will look at the virtualization, provisioning, brokering, licensing and authentication services, without the need to drill down to hardware to be used or the number of servers for example to make up the brokering service.

The HLD should look at all the options available with a particular system and/or technology and then then makes recommendations tailored to the specific environment in which the system and/or technology is going to be deployed in.

Requirements Traceability

It's important to ensure functional and non-functional requirements can be mapped to this design document, again only high level requirements need to be mapped, so 'Continuity' would only look at defining the need for a secondary data centre without the need to go into the details of a secondary data centre and how it operates.

The goal of the HLD needs to focus on providing enough information to those who have some technical knowledge, such as programme/project managers without the need for completely confusing them.

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