A friend of mine gave a presentation about the evolution of software development as an engineering disipline. His focus is on waterfall and agile methodologies. In his talk my friend reveals that waterfall was not proposed as a methodology that would succeed but rather it was presented as the antithesis of a methodology that was responsive to the challenges of software development. As a developer, I am interested in a transition that happened in parallel, in the move from monolithic programs to modular code. What drove programmers to develop new goals for the code they wrote, going from writing perhaps 10,000 line programs to developing modular code and then to developing and deploying modular components.
The Rise of Structured Programming
From the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s, most IT developers learned what was considered the proper style of programming from Ed Yourdon’s books. He was the first popular advocate of Structured Programming or what was then often called "GOTOless programming". Besides banni