Evolution of software design techniques .
During the 1950s, most programs were being written in assembly language. These programs were limited to about a few hundreds of lines of assembly code, i.e. were very small in size. Every programmer developed programs in his own individual style - based on his intuition. This type of programming was called Exploratory Programming.
The next significant development which occurred during early 1960s in the area computer programming was the high-level language programming.
Use of high-level language programming reduced development efforts and development time significantly. Languages like FORTRAN, ALGOL, and COBOL were introduced at that time.
As the size and complexity of programs kept on increasing, the exploratory programming style proved to be insufficient. Programmers found it increasingly difficult not only to write cost -effective and correct programs, but also to understand and maintain programs written by others. To cope with this problem, experienced programmers advised other programmers to pay particular attention to the design of the program’s control flow structure (in late 1960s). In the late 1960s, it was found that the "GOTO" statement was the main culprit which makes control structure of a program complicated and messy. At that time most of the programmers used assembly languages extensively. They considered use of "GOTO" statements in high-level languages were very natural because of their familiarity with JUMP statements which are very frequently used in assembly language programming. So they did not really accept that they can write programs without using GOTO statements, and considered the frequent use of GOTO statements inevitable. At this time, Dijkstra [1968] published his (now famous) article “GOTO Statements Considered Harmful”. Expectedly, many programmers were enraged to read this article. They published several counter articles highlighting the advantages and inevitably of GOTO statements. But, soon it was conclusively proved that only three programming constructs – sequence, selection, and iteration – were sufficient to express any programming logic. This formed the basis of the structured programming methodology.
After structured programming, the next important development was data structure-oriented design. Programmers argued that for writing a good program, it is important to pay more attention to the design of data structure, of the program rather than to the design of its control structure. Data structure-oriented design techniques actually help to derive program structure from the data structure of the program. Example of a very popular data structure-oriented design technique is Jackson's Structured Programming (JSP) methodology, developed by Michael Jackson in the1970s.
Next significant development in the late 1970s was the development of data flow-oriented design technique. Experienced programmers stated that to have a good program structure, one has to study how the data flows from input to the output of the program. Every program reads data and then processes that data to produce some output. Once the data flow structure is identified, then from there one can derive the program structure.
Object-oriented design (1980s) is the latest and very widely used technique. It has an intuitively appealing design approach in which natural objects (such as employees, pay-roll register, etc.) occurring in a problem are first identified. Relationships among objects (such as composition, reference and inheritance) are determined. Each object essentially acts as a data hiding entity.
Evolution of software design techniques | software engineering