This short history identifies 32 major classes of software methods that have emerged over the last 50 years. There are many variations of each major class of software method, which renders the number of software methods in the hundreds. This short history contains a brief synopsis of each of the 32 major classes of software methods, identifying the decade and year they appeared, their purpose, their major tenets, their strengths, and their weaknesses. The year each software method appeared corresponds to the seminal work that introduced the method based on extensive bibliographic research and the strengths and weaknesses were based on scholarly and empirical works to provide an objective capstone for each method.

The 1960s were a defining period for the world of computers giving rise to what we now know as mainframe computers (Solomon, 1966). Think of mainframe computers as building-sized calculators, most of which can now fit in your shirt pocket and are versatile enough to run on sunlight. Of course, these mainframe computers gave rise to large scale operating systems requiring hundreds of expert programmers to produce over many years (Needham and Hartley, 1969). More importantly, high-level computer programming languages such as the Common Business Oriented Language or COBOL were created to help humans communicate with these building-sized calculators and instruct them to perform useful functions more easily (Sammet, 1962). The creation of these mainframes, their operating systems, and their high-level COBOL computer programming languages caused the North Atlantic Treaty Organization or NATO to form a new technical discipline called software engineering to help manage the explosion of computer programming projects (Naur & Randell, 1969). But, this was only the tip of the iceberg, because transistors were being commercialized, which would soon give rise to an explosion of new computers, operating systems, programming languages, and software projects that NATO could never have anticipated (Smith, 1965). However, suffice it to say that mainframes met the needs of the government and corporate bureaucracies that dominated the market and era of the 1960s rather well (Niskanen, 1968).

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