https://www.thinkulum.net/w/index.php?action=history&feed=atom&title=Software_Development%2FSoftware_Development_Methodology 2026-04-09T14:12:59Z Revision history for this page on the wiki MediaWiki 1.37.1 https://www.thinkulum.net/w/index.php?title=Software_Development/Software_Development_Methodology&diff=373&oldid=prev 2019-02-22T04:56:55Z

<p>Added the article.</p> <p><b>New page</b></p><div>I'll start with some general principles that direct my thinking about software development in general. These are the ideas behind agile development practices. [https://www.agilealliance.org/agile101/ Agile software development] is a paradigm that was created to answer waterfall development, the approach of planning all the features of a piece of software in advance, an effort that often ends up wasted because the customer's needs change in the middle of the project, so the software has to be redesigned.<br /> <br /> So agile development was intended to prevent overplanning. But using any development methodology will help prevent the opposite problem, which is a complete ''lack'' of structure and discipline. This results in a code organization scheme called a [http://www.laputan.org/mud/ big ball of mud]. I don't think my programs were complete mud, but the fact that I was the only one seeing or using my code let me get by with a lot of slacking. Slacking does keep you from working too hard, but it fails to prevent other kinds of problems. Agile software development seems like a good middle ground.<br /> <br /> Agile development encompasses a lot of principles and practices, and it has a lot of varieties, but for me at this point, its most important practices are incremental development, test-driven development, and refactoring.<br /> <br /> * [[../Iterative and Incremental Development/]]<br /> * [[../Test-First Programming/]]<br /> * [[../Refactoring/]]<br /> <br /> [[Category:Programming]]<br /> [[Category:Essays]]<br /> [[Category:Developing]]</div>

Andy Culbertson