Term Definition: design mechanism

An architectural mechanism used during the design process, during the period in which the details of the design are being worked out. They are related to associated analysis mechanisms, of which they are additional refinements, and they may bind one or more architectural and design patterns. There is not necessarily any difference in scale between the analysis mechanism and the design mechanism- it is thus possible to speak of a persistence mechanism at the analysis level and the design level and mean the same thing, but at a different level of refinement. A design mechanism assumes some details of the implementation environment, but it is not tied to a specific implementation (as is an implementation mechanism). For example, the analysis mechanism for inter-process communication may be refined by several design mechanisms for interprocess communication (IPC): shared memory, function-call-like IPC, semaphore-based IPC, and so on. Each design mechanism has certain strengths and weaknesses; the choice of a particular design mechanism is determined by the characteristics of the objects using the mechanism.