Approaches to Software Development

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... :

> 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 :

> 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... 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.