Keywords - Software Development, Top Down, Class Structure, Inheritance, Abstraction, Programming, Computer Science.
I. Introduction
In this document, we will investigate the concept of Top Down Development. We will discuss the notion, history, and the ideology to develop software with this method.
Top Down Development is a design phase methodology in software engineering. The purpose is to make the organization of the program as efficient as possible, while allowing the software programmers to have an easy guideline when moving into the coding stage of software development. To explain the methodology in a simple manner, it is taking complex parts of a design, and breaking them down into smaller, simpler pieces [1]. It is often visualized as an upside down tree, with the main idea of the program on the top, and breaking that idea into several, smaller working ideas, and repeating that process until the ideas get to a primitive …show more content…
As computer science became more popular among research institutions, so did the applications in the business and computing world. IBM was the first company to commercially promote Top Down Development when Harlan Mills and Niklaus Wirth, IBM researchers, developed the process to complete the New York Times Morgue index in 1969. The popularity of this idea spread throughout the company, and when Niklaus Wirth published his prominent paper “Program Development by Stepwise Refinement, it eventually became a sensation within the industry [3]. Essentially, Top Down Development was born out of the growing demand for computer software and is still used today as a prominent approach to software