Artifacts in Software Design

“A scientific discipline emerges with the — usually rather slow! — discovery of which aspects can be meaningfully ‘studied in isolation for the sake of their own consistency’.”1 This statement made by E.W. Dijkstra was meant to express a specific desire, namely, to achieve basic improvements in software development by means of mathematical tools and concepts allowing us to express algorithms and data structures in an increasingly precise, unambiguous, consistent and complete manner. The question is, however, whether isolated mathematical properties provide the only — and a sufficient — basis for establishing a scientific discipline.