Introduction

Abstract

Software engineers are invariably confronted with the question of which development methods to use in order to produce good software. If we ask how exactly software development is to be organized, we come up against a wide variety of different concepts. But there is not only an abundance of concepts, there is even greater diversity in the terms used to describe them. What one software engineer chooses to call “process model” is termed by another “project strategy”; and there are “system requirements”, “requirements analyses”, “user needs analyses” and “software models”. How we can make practical use of the proposed concepts remains a mystery. At any rate, it would seem impossible to draw any sort of comparison between them.