How to improve batch program designing skills?

[sivaguru]

Dear and most valued techies,

I am working as an application developer in COBOL-DB2. I was working on enhancements for a couple of years. I missed to observe/learn the design perspective to implement the business requirements. Now that I realize it is very important to learn from others' designs, I would like to know how I can improve my designing skills to reduce the rework at a later stage. Learning through experience is certainly an unavoidable path to proactive design. However, I feel that experience comes with acting on the desire and not wait for something to happen. This has been my mistake.

Please advise what I can do to learn to do better designs. In short, how to improve the skills of applying a theoretical concept I know into the design? Eg. I know how a COBOL array can be declared. But how do I learn to use it during an application design? Especially, meeting the deadlines has been a major huddle in trying different/alternative solutions.

I searched in the internet and found the below link. The books suggested are for Object-Oriented programming.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7968 ... ign-skills

Please excuse for the lengthy explanation. I am not expecting any short-cut to the hard-earned experience. Kindly share your wisdom how this can be done.

Thank you very much, in advance.

[NicC]

Look up Jackson Structured Design.

[sivaguru]

Thank you very much, NicC, for your reply.