Development of software passes through different stage of evolution which is called as software development cycle. Designing is a critical area in the software development cycle. Designing occurs early in software development life cycle and the errors introduced during the design of the software can make the software totally unusable in production. The design errors must be identified and corrected, so that cost of correcting defects in the later stages of software development cycle is minimum. In this survey paper, we study the current methods to identify software design errors and find the current gaps to propose open areas for further research. © Research India Publications.