The Lost Decades
A friend claims that software design evolved as an engineering disipline due to the move from waterfall SDLC (systems development lifecycle) to the agile project management process. He claims that the move from waterfall SDLC to agile methodology is what propelled application design from monolithic style applications to modular code that works with unit testing frameworks.
The first reference to SDLC dates to a 1968 software conference (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_Software_Engineering_Conferences) and ironically, waterfall SDLC was not proposed as a methodology that would succeed but rather it was presented as the antithesis of a workable methodology. His thesis is that methodology impacted the design of application code, pushing it from monolithic to modular. I too am interested in how the style of application code evolved from monolithic programs to modular code. Was it a top down movement driven by methodology or did programmers develop new goals for the code they wrote, going