Software development is a difficult and time-consuming process. As software systems become larger and ever more complex, developers are searching for mechanisms to control that complexity. The main goals have always been to lower the cost and improve productivity, reuse, and maintainability. The procedure-oriented paradigm and structured programming were popular for a while, and their fundamentals may still be valid. Today, however, OO is being heralded by many as one promising solution. This roundtable contains an assortment of short articles from both industry and academia on aspects of object orientation: distributed objects in the client-server environment, standardization efforts to ensure cross-platform interoperability, object technology and parallel computing, object-oriented databases, the problems inherent in OO testing, and, finally, the theoretical foundations of object-based programming.