A Short History of Iterative Software Development
[This post has also been published on DZone.com , where it has gathered well over 5,000 views.] It is useful to know about the various iterative software development project methodologies and how they originated, not so that you can follow them religiously but so that you can add them to your bag of tricks. I recommend learning about the following. Kanban (1953), whose origin lies within the Toyota manufacturing process innovations Scrum (1986), and its storied origin in the 1986 Harvard Business Review seminal article The New New Product Development Game , which examined 6 major Japanese and American companies to conclude that successful teams had replaced sequential approaches with iterative ones Rational Unified Process (1996), proposed by IBM in response to some of the growing market forces looking for alternatives to the Waterfall family of methodologies Lean (1998), and its origin in Toyota's manufacturing system Agile (2001), especially the contents and motiv...