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HOW TO START A RELIGIOUS (OR SOFTWARE) WAR

In 1517, as legend has it, Dr. Martin Luther tacked his famous 95 Theses on a church door in the small German city of Wittenberg, thus indirectly setting in motion some of the most vicious religious wars in history. In 2001, a number of proponents of various radical software development methodologies roughly aligned with Extreme Programming (XP) met in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA, and issued something they called the Agile Manifesto, thereby signaling the beginning of a new software methodology war -- one between the old guard, who they saw as being represented by the supporters of the Software Engineering Institute's (SEI) Capability Maturity Model (CMM), and their new agile development movement. So, it would seem, if you wish to start a religious (or software) war, you ought to issue some sort of edict.¹

In December 2001 and January 2002, Cutter IT Journal devoted two full issues to "The Great Methodology Debate" (Part I: Vol. 14, No. 12; Part II: Vol. 15, No. 1), which contained the viewpoints of those on both sides of this issue. This Executive Report is intended to go more in-depth about the relationship between "agile" and "rigorous" or "light" and "heavy" systems development approaches.

Having been a participant myself in many methodology wars over the years, I don't expect to persuade any of the major combatants. What I hope to do is help clarify what I think this debate is really about and to see whether, at some point, we can come up with new ways of looking at how software development can be improved even in the most troubled organizations.