Program Development by Stepwise Refinement (1971)

http://sunnyday.mit.edu/16.355/

The full list of readings for the course is interesting as well.

This methodology is what we were taught, in pascal, as our 101 CS course around 1986. The hardest part of teaching it was actually explaining the syntax to first time thinkers. The abstractions were easier.

Too bad they didn't give an edgy name like "agile" or "scrum"...

Your comment was meant in jest, but I believe this article was written in the context of the push for "structured programming". The "structured" in that was selected for a reason: What business wants to say that it's making unstructured programs? It sounds chaotic, unmaintainable, and like a ticking time bomb. So the people responsible for pushing the ideas of structured programming selected a name that made it hard to argue against.

EDIT: Double checked the date of the original article, it was 1971. Right in the middle of the Structured Programming push by Dijkstra and others (who is cited in the article).

Rename old ideas into newfangled sounding ones and they might take off again. Mainframes were the first "cloud servers", they were just called "mainframes" instead.