Talk:Software development process

Agile, Waterfall, Spiral – Frameworks or Models rather than Methodologies

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 tc 05:57, 7 August 2017 (UTC)

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)

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)

Extreme programming "other than agile"?

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)

Process is not the same as lifecycle

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)

Redirects for discussion

A lot of redirects, relating to this article, have been nominated for discussion. See Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2026 March 17#Software life cycle. Melozone crissalis (talk) 22:56, 17 March 2026 (UTC)