Building Blocks of Software Design

Software design involves the process of understanding the requirements and creating the artifacts that specify these requirements as the product to be built. The specification of the requirements ultimately happens in code. Intermediate abstraction mechanisms, such as domain modeling languages, software design and architecture patterns, programming paradigms, and design fragments, assist software engineers to specify requirements further into the final designs as implementations. However, in the absence of commonly agreed-upon building blocks that assist software engineers in tracing the design specification across software elements, these abstraction mechanisms become sources of unintended errors. Consequently, despite the availability of many software development lifecycle processes and implementation tool support, designs erode and drift from their intent quicker than anticipated.