

Approaches to Software Development - Spearchucker
https://www.wittenburg.co.uk/Entry.aspx?id=99bb5987-e08d-4e81-974d-daa5e07c0d5f

======
dalke
It's important to know that this essay uses "Agile" in an overly broad term
that diminishes the importance of other methodologies by denying their
existence.

Quoting from
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_development_process#Ap...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_development_process#Approaches)
:

> Common methodologies include waterfall, prototyping, iterative and
> incremental development, spiral development, rapid application development,
> extreme programming and agile methodology

To help understand the context, I'm a RAD practitioner, and dislike how
certain aspects have been labeled first as an XP response to waterfall and
then as an Agile response to waterfall - even though these aspects of RAD were
already decades old.

Laurent Bossavit makes the point quite nicely in
[http://www.infoq.com/articles/bossavit-agile-ten-years-
on](http://www.infoq.com/articles/bossavit-agile-ten-years-on) :

> How much: the Agile movement has succeeded in overturning many previous
> orthodoxies. It cannot entirely be credited with the demise of Waterfall;
> this was already well under way at the time of Boehm's Spiral model,
> introduced in the late 1980's.

The author of this essay actually knows that it's not "waterfall" vs. "Agile",
as seen in
[https://www.wittenburg.co.uk/Entry.aspx?id=d84dff2a-c5cd-463...](https://www.wittenburg.co.uk/Entry.aspx?id=d84dff2a-c5cd-4638-9141-76568e4cc58b)
which is a recommender applet for Spiral, Prototyping, Agile, and Waterfall;
which makes the newer essay's simplistic and ahistorical contrast of "agile
vs. waterfall" all the more irksome.

