ABSTRACT
As is expected of any profession that is still relatively young, IT has evolved — and is still continuing to evolve — from highly individual seatof-the-pants techniques for developing and maintaining systems to formal, well-documented methodologies. In the early days, when what is now called information technology (IT) was referred to as data processing, there were no methodologies or formal guidelines for developing systems. Systems were developed under what IT now knows was the mistaken belief that their life span would never exceed five years, and thus longterm maintainability was not considered a major concern.
