I have been a programmer for a very (very) (very) long time and it is my considered (and correct) opinion that the best software development methodology is not Agile or Waterfall or Spiral or Scrum or Kanban or Rapid Application Development or Feature-Driven Development or Test-Driven Development or Extreme or Lean or Joint Application Development or any of a couple of dozen others produced by people with books to sell and seminars to schedule.

The best software development methodology consists of one person with a list of things to do in a text file. If a piece of software cannot be development via this method, it should not be developed at all. Such things have only gotten us in trouble.

In very, very rare circumstances — operating systems, the space program, any AAA video game I like — the second-best software development methodology is allowed. This consists of a team of four or five people who share the text file and go out to lunch together every day but don’t talk about work.