A definition of the design changes – with integration into an existing application infrastructure if needed, and high-level class diagrams and sequence diagrams - need not specify methods and properties at this level.

Design is by no means something that is covered in a one-page SDLC Document. You will have to incorporate standard design practices, as dictated by your platform, development methodology and environment. The purpose of conceptual design nevertheless is the most important aspect to keep in mind. Your goal is to depict and document exactly how the different modules in the code will (at a high level) address the requirements, or the problem that you are trying to solve. Pictures say a thousand words. Use livid illustrations to depict how your implementation will solve the problem. Needless to say, Conceptual design is for both programmers and managers - therefore it needs to be friendly to people who do not understand the intricacies of Remoting or CORBA for instance, but know the objective and purpose and understand the technology enough to understand your plan.

Here are a few of the artifacts that you can include as part of High Level (Conceptual) Design

• Process Flow Diagrams
• Data Flow Diagrams
• Entity Relationship Diagrams
• UML Use Case Diagrams
• UML Deployment Diagrams
• UML Class Diagrams - Object Level Modeling
• UML Sequence Diagrams - Object Behavior at a high level