No doubt it is possible to produce software without considering its design. The "from the brain into the terminal" approach is still a widely used "design method". If you are lucky to use an object oriented language such as JAVA or C++ this may even compensate a lot of the problems of such an ad hoc approach. However, you will find that what you believed to save by skipping the design phase, you have to spend on higher testing efforts and bugfixes. Worst case these bugfixes happen after your product has been shipped to the customer. Further, without a proper design you have to expect higher maintenance costs. Any addition of features may destabilize your software and bring contained faults to "the front", i.e. bugs which were contained in your software and did not bother so far, now lead to failures in your system.

A proper design will definitely minimize these problems and eventually save you a lot of money. There is no substitute for a good design. Exhaustive testing may enable you to ship a software which is giving the expected results, but at a too high price. On these pages I want to give you a few insights into a possible design for microcontroller software.

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