The Five Steps - Top Down Decomposition

Understand the problem

Do a small example by hand

Write an algorithm for solving the problem

Here is where our approach differs from bottom up. Instead of trying to write the algorithm for the entire program, we begin by breaking up the program into modules to handle the details of different aspects of solving the task.

We can represent this decomposition of the problem by a structure diagram:

Our modules are:

Translate the algorithm into a programming language (like C)

Test the program

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