Software Structures: A Careful Look

If all software experts agree on anything, it is that software shouldn't be a monolith (a large system that is, for all practical purposes, indivisible). In the half century since Edsger Dijkstra published his groundbreaking paper, “The Structure of the ‘THE’-Multiprogramming System,”1 it has become clear that the ability to design a software system's structure is at least as important as the ability to design efficient algorithms or to write code in a particular programming language.