Here’s a link to an article by Jack Reeves called “What is Software Design?” from the C++ Journal in 1992.
On source code:
“The final goal of any engineering activity is the some type of documentation. When a design effort is complete, the design documentation is turned over to the manufacturing team. This is a completely different group with completely different skills from the design team. If the design documents truly represent a complete design, the manufacturing team can proceed to build the product. In fact, they can proceed to build lots of the product, all without any further intervention of the designers. After reviewing the software development life cycle as I understood it, I concluded that the only software documentation that actually seems to satisfy the criteria of an engineering design is the source code listings.”
On builds:
“There is one consequence of considering code as software design that completely overwhelms all others. It is so important and so obvious that it is a total blind spot for most software organizations. This is the fact that software is cheap to build. It does not qualify as inexpensive; it is so cheap it is almost free. If source code is a software design, then actually building software is done by compilers and linkers. We often refer to the process of compiling and linking a complete software system as "doing a build".”
On testing:
“The software design is not complete until it has been coded and tested. Testing is a fundamental part of the design validation and refinement process. The high level structural design is not a complete software design; it is just a structural framework for the detailed design. We have very limited capabilities for rigorously validating a high level design. The detailed design will ultimately influence (or should be allowed to influence) the high level design at least as much as other factors. Refining all the aspects of a design is a process that should be happening throughout the design cycle. If any aspect of the design is frozen out of the refinement process, it is hardly surprising that the final design will be poor or even unworkable.”
On programming languages:
“This says that the collective subconscious of the software industry instinctively knows that improvements in programming techniques and real world programming languages in particular are overwhelmingly more important than anything else in the software business. It also says that programmers are interested in design. When more expressive programming languages become available, software developers will adopt them.”
On development process:
“Also consider how the process of software development is changing. Once upon a time we had the waterfall process. Now we talk of spiral development and rapid prototyping. While such techniques are often justified with terms like "risk abatement" and "shortened product delivery times", they are really just excuses to start coding earlier in the life cycle. This is good. This allows the build/test cycle to start validating and refining the design earlier. It also means that it is more likely that the software designers that developed the top level design are still around to do the detailed design.”