Editor's Introduction: Software Design in a Postmodern Era

Over the last 30 years, software design has made tremendous progress. But this progress hasn't been continuous: it proceeded by jumps and leaps, with some plateaus in between. Reaching a plateau isn't at all negative; it's a necessary step for a discipline to integrate good practices, to reflect, and to produce a critique that will launch further progress. Perhaps we've reached another, more fundamental plateau, wittily called the era of "postmodern programming" by James Noble and Robert Biddle. The author poses three questions regarding software design and then begins to answer them: Where are we? Where do we want to go from here? And what exactly is software design?