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 -- Jack Reeves
The design of a software project is an abstract concept. It has to do with the overall shape and structure of the program, as well as the detailed shape and structure of each module, class, and method. The design can be represented by many different media, but its final embodiment is source code. In the end, the source code is the design. -- Robert Martin
