Innovative Software Engineering Methodologies

Question

I am preparing a presentation. My topic is innovative software engineering methodologies. Agile is modern and innovative methodology but is the answer just Agile? What are the other innovative and modern methodologies? Are test driven development and behavior driven development also innovative methodologies? And eXtreme Programming is traditional methodology like waterfall?

erencan · Answer 1 · 2016-10-12T18:46:09.860

I am not sure we can categorize these methodologies or frameworks as innovative, traditional or something else.

The choosing for a methodology or framework is completely depend on the product and customer needs. Any of them that meet the product requirements and provide efficiency to your team can be innovative in that scope.

Most of the software development process is developing complex products in complex environments in today's development World. I totally agree that agile methodologies, extreme programming, TDD and BDD are matches very well to the before definition of developing complex products in complex environment. Therefore, most of the agile methodologies are inspection of developing complex products.

Agile methodologies

The term agile is a really popular term used by software development professionals. There are lots of agile methodologies, frameworks like scrum, kanban or XP. They suggest methods to use to make us agile. The term agile is all covers these methods. Most of them solves the prediction, adaptation, transparency, inspection and empirical processes. All agile methodologies try to solve these problems faces during software development.

Extreme Programming

Extreme programming focuses on developing qualified software products and adopting to changing requirements and environment. Honestly, I really like XP. It does not suggest only development methodologies. It also suggests some about customer management, cost management etc. It is really basic, but hard to implement. I highly suggest to read the book Extreme Programming Explained by Kent Beck.

See also

Continious Integration

Products over projects

The Clean Coder: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers

@erencan awesome list. Thank you very much. Scrum.org says that scrum is not a methodology, it is a framework but you are using in the response as "scrum is another methodology". You can check this [post](https://www.scrum.org/About/All-Articles/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/658/Scrum-Framework-not-methodology) — hkulekci, Oct 12 '16 at 18:36
you are rigth @hkulekci. I updated the post accordingly. Thanks for your help. — erencan, Oct 12 '16 at 18:47

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 11 '16 at 21:12

I think you are mixing up practises, methodologies and philosophy.

For finding new innovative software development methods you could look at the big tech companies and how they are doing it.

Let's take Facebook, they practise "The hacker way" as described in Erik Meijer's GOTO 2015 video. According to Erik its not Agile. It has a focus on making code, not talking a lot about code as in most Agile frameworks.

If you look at Spotify they have their own home-grown scaling "Agile" implementation. Looks really fun, see the Spotify engineering culture video's.

But are they really innovative? or is it just evolution of the cycle?

The things you name are not at all innovate anymore. Most are more then 10 years old. They are tried and tested concepts, some love them, some hate them, but innovative hell no.

In the end software development is a process where there is not a one size fits all solution. This because coding is a creative process, which is hard to standardise. Each company and product needs to find their own path.

score 1 · Answer 3 · edited Jun 20 '20 at 09:12

"Agile" is a term coined in 2001 by a bunch of people who got together to work out why their projects tended to succeed (or fail fast) where other projects failed (sometimes expensively).

The Agile Manifesto came out of that meeting. You can see the list of people underneath. There are a bunch of people who are associated with principles, methods and practices that are all considered "Agile": Scrum, Crystal, XP, TDD, etc.

So "Agile" is an umbrella term for a bunch of stuff that follows the main values and principles.

The word "methodology" has a large number of vague meanings, so I'm going to take it back to its origins to. It comes from "method" and "ology".

From etymonline.com, the etymology includes:

Method: regular, systematic treatment... way of teaching or going... scientific inquiry... investigation... pursuit, a following after... a traveling, way... way of doing anything.

-ology: branch of knowledge, science

-logy: a speaking, discourse, treatise, doctrine, theory, science... the character or deportment of one who speaks or treats of (a certain subject)

So the "Agile Methodology" is an umbrella term for a bunch of values, principles, practices and ideas for how to do software development better; the teaching of those ideas; the following of those ideas; and the people who encompass that community.

I'll quickly go through the things you've mentioned so you can see how they're all part of Agile:

Test-Driven Development: part of XP originating with Kent Beck, popularized by other signatories too like Brian Marick who created JUnit
Behaviour-Driven Development: originated with Dan North, basically TDD without the word "test", except that's more profound than it sounds. Certainly derivative of Agile methods.
eXtreme Programming: Also Kent Beck, introduced TDD, definitely Agile.
Waterfall: typified by trying to get everything right up front, definitely not Agile.

However, there are a bunch of things which are emerging which come from other disciplines. A lot of the Lean body of knowledge, originating from Lean Manufacturing in Toyota, especially with respect to Deming's work, is starting to play into the space. So you get things like:

Lean Startup - ideas validated quickly through prototypes and experiments that might not be viable long-term, but which allow for immediate survival or profit
Lean UX - focused on continual UI improvement in collaboration with development team rather than requirements capture and analysis
Lean Product Development - Toyota's method for designing new cars applied to the software space, including set-based concurrent engineering, etc.
Kanban for Software Development - management methods that balance demand and capacity, also based on ideas originating from Toyota.

There's also a whole ton of other knowledge and ideas which are probably outside the scope of what you're looking for, so I'm going to just throw out the terms to raise awareness.

Product Development: Impact Mapping, Story Mapping, Example Mapping, A/B testing
Technical flow: DevOps, Continuous Integration, Continuous Deployment
People and Psychology: Dan Pink's "Drive", Cynefin, Neurodiversity, Social Capital
Scaled Agile methods: Large Scale Scrum (LeSS), Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD)
Strategy: Lean Canvas, Enterprise Services Planning (ESP), Simon Wardley's Strategy Maps.

Some of the terms here really are emergent and will probably change; these lists are definitely not complete. Mostly I've included them to give you an idea of the scope of where Agile started, how wide the community is and where it's going.

I think in the future it won't be called Agile any more, and it's going to end up including the whole business, not just IT, which IMO is a fantastic thing. It's already started to increase collaboration across the world, beyond the borders of businesses, and that's the next step.

I would love it if your presentation ended with that as a note.

_So the "Agile Methodology" is an umbrella term for a bunch of values, principles, practices and ideas for how to do software development **better**_ - I am not agree with term "better". "Agile Methodology" - is methodology which help make software development **agile**. Remember that "agile" word is adjective. So methodologies will help make your development "able to move quickly and easy, able to quickly react to upcoming changes" — Fabio, Oct 15 '16 at 20:40
"We are uncovering **better** ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it." - http://agilemanifesto.org . The term "agile" was coined from trying to work out what they were doing that worked, retrospectively. It was a description, not a goal. — Lunivore, Oct 15 '16 at 20:54
_"Agile" is a term coined in 2001 by a bunch of people who got together to work out why their projects were succeeding where other projects failed_ At the time, C3 from which XP came was considered a failure by Chrysler management who subsequently banned the methodology. That project had a couple of the Agile signatories. — Dave Hillier, Oct 16 '16 at 11:19
@DaveHillier It's a good point; I've changed the wording accordingly. Note that the C3 project did actually go live, so at least it had that going for it. Nowadays we probably would look for off-the-shelf solutions for something as stable as payroll, rather than using Agile for it, but then we understand strategy a lot better now than we did in 2001. — Lunivore, Oct 17 '16 at 16:48

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Nov 17 '16 at 09:54

Hi @Yusuf as I mostly worked on agile and prototyping method while developing application. In my opinion prototyping is the most innovative way of applying software engineering practices since the client and the other stackholders are free to suggest any model and that model can be used to develop the prototype. And it goes on until the stack-holder get the desired software. Moreover I like and learn from the answer of @erencan

Innovative Software Engineering Methodologies

4 Answers4