Why do we need to design?

In my short career i have worked in some simple projects as well as few million dollar projects.But in any of the projects i haven't seen any real design happened. Even if we did some design, it's just like preparing a big document with lots of unimportant and redundant details.Ok, coming back to the question, why do we need to design?

To put succinctly, Analysis is modelling of a problem, and Design is modelling of a solution. Analysis produces documents that customer can understand and design produces documents that programmer's can understand.

The primary need for design is, identifying the important issues early in the development.If you have identified potential issues early,it's easy to concentrate on those issues and thus avoid many risks later.The next best thing that design provides us is, it improves communication between the programmers and even with the customers.If you have a good design in hand, it's really easy to communicate your approach towards solving the problem.Ultimately, design helps us to change the software easily.It helps us to identify where to make changes to provide flexibility when the product is evloving.

Happy designing...