Talk:Software development process

WikiProject icon This article is within the scope of WikiProject Computing , a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of computers, computing, and information technology on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.ComputingWikipedia:WikiProject ComputingTemplate:WikiProject ComputingComputing

High This article has been rated as High-importance on the project's importance scale.

---

This page has archives. Sections older than 180 days may be auto-archived by Lowercase sigmabot III if there are more than 4.

I don't feel comfortable calling Agile, Waterfall and even Spiral a "methodology". These approaches of software development are rather frameworks or models than methodologies. Agile makes that particularly clear: It provides a number of values, philosophies and principles, and advocates certain development approaches, but nonetheless doesn't prescribe (or dictate) them in a way that a methodology such as Scrum does. If there are no objections, I'd like to change that in the article. – invenio t c 05:57, 7 August 2017 (UTC) [reply ]

Sadly, nobody changed the article. And they certainly aren't "methodologies" by Wikipedia's definition of the term. They're methods.

Gypsydave5 (talk) 21:26, 12 October 2021 (UTC) [reply ]

I suggest that the ISO/IEC definition of "methodology" should be our reference definition for improvements on this article. see ISO 24744 - Preview --Dobinator (talk) 09:20, 1 May 2022 (UTC) [reply ]

My edit summary was incorrect, but this is about software development, which is not a compound word. A discussion should be undertaken before assumptions like this are made again. Walter Görlitz (talk) 14:29, 21 March 2019 (UTC) [reply ]

The following paragraph describes extreme programming as "other than agile", but extreme programming is widely (also according to Wikipedia) regarded as a type of agile software development.

"Most modern development processes can be vaguely described as agile. Other methodologies include waterfall, prototyping, iterative and incremental development, spiral development, rapid application development, and extreme programming." Olaeld (talk) 08:59, 20 September 2023 (UTC) [reply ]

The article starts with "a software development process or software development life cycle (SDLC) is ..." which clearly conflates the two terms. They are highly related, yes, but not the same.

The lifecycle is a description of what happens during the life of a software thing. A process, a formal process, is the self-imposed, agreed upon way to go about creating and maintaining a software thing. The lifecycle is more natural (as natural as software gets) and process is more artificial -- something developers self-impose onto themself in order to create/maintain the software ... throughout its lifecycle. One more subtlety: even if there is no agreed upon process or in spite of an agreed upon process (!), there is still a process that occurs; an ad hoc process. The article should not gloss over (conflate) these different aspects. This article seems focused only on formal process; giving the reader a false impression. Stevebroshar (talk) 11:24, 25 July 2025 (UTC) [reply ]