Guest Editors' Introduction: Studying Professional Software Design

This special issue sets an agenda for research into early software design, and this introduction outlines drivers and issues for that agenda. It argues that looking at software from a design perspective, understanding software as a designed artifact, and considering how design reaches into the whole software life cycle can bring significant benefits both to our understanding of what works in software design and to our approach to tools and practices. The special issue presents outputs from an NSF-funded workshop on 'Studying Professional Software Design' held in 2010 at UC Irvine in which participants analyzed the same professional design sessions from different analytic perspectives. The workshop dialogues provide an example of what's critically needed to drive this research agenda: empirically grounded dialogues between research and practitioners.