• A strategy of processing information and ordering knowledge, used in a variety of fields including software, humanistic and scientific theories, and management and organization. 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. ← Wikipedia

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