Bottom-up and top-down approaches

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Bottom-up and top-down are strategies of composition and decomposition in fields as diverse as information processing and ordering knowledge, software, humanistic and scientific theories (see systemics), time management, and organization. In practice they can be seen as a style of thinking, teaching or leadership. A top-down approach (also known as stepwise design and stepwise refinement and in some cases used as a synonym of decomposition) is essentially the breaking down of a system to gain insight into its compositional subsystems in a reverse engineering fashion. In a top-down approach an overview of the system is formulated, specifying but not detailing, any first-level subsystems. Each subsystem is then refined in yet greater detail, sometimes in many additional subsystem levels until the entire specification is reduced to base elements. A top-down model is often specified with the assistance of black boxes, which makes it easier to manipulate. However, black boxes may fail to clarify...

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