I am old enough to have lived through multiple technical cycles. When I started professionally, CASE tools were the rage, and OS/2 was still a thing.

Communications of the ACM

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2021-05-25 04:00:09

I am old enough to have lived through multiple technical cycles. When I started professionally, CASE tools were the rage, and OS/2 was still a thing. I even worked on a mainframe for a bit. Then came client-server development (as popularized by Windows applications, as strictly speaking the 'client-server' pattern was not new). Then Java, the first-generation Web applications with application servers and a myriad of Model View Controller frameworks. Then second-generation Web development with more responsive JavaScript-based Web applications that replicated many of the things that people liked about thick-client applications, and then some. Then big data broke on the scene, and then cloud architectures.

Concurrent to these technical advancements, new development methodologies kept appearing, such as Lean, Safe, Scrum, Agile, Extreme Programming, RAD, JAD, Spiral, and so forth, to better organize software efforts. As much as each new methodology heaped scorn upon each other, they all reserved the most contempt for Waterfall, the original methodology.

Planning, Analysis, Design, Construction, and Maintenance were for Luddites, so the chorus went. Waterfall was the Hive 0.10 of its day—everybody loved hating it, everybody loved measuring itself against it. I not only remember Waterfall, but I remember E& Y's Navigator Methodology, which was a particular expression of Waterfall which contained even more liquid and fell from even greater heights. Navigator was delivered with yards of binders. Even as a career newbie, I thought that was a bit heavyweight.

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