Communications of the ACM
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Technical competence in system design encompasses at least an appreciation of a number of issues that are often dismissed as being merely managerial in nature, since most system programmers seek a purely technical definition of what constitutes a system design, if they think about the problem at all. This paper reviews the area between the purely technical and the purely managerial as it pertains to the design portion of the system development cycle and finds this area non-empty. "System", in the author's lexicon, is an antonym of "chaos"; the two main sections of the paper discuss the components of the design activity and byways which lead to chaotic systems.