ABSTRACT
Executive summary: Other than cowboy development, the “structured development” methodology is the oldest in this book . It originated around 1968 in a famous letter from Edsger Dijkstra to the “Communications of the ACM” on “Go to statements considered harmful.” The first and oldest form of structured development was structured programming. Then, the concept expanded to structured analysis and structured design and eventually to the blanket term “structured development.” The method was adopted by large corporations such as IBM in the 1970s when they were struggling to control the costs and quality of applications that were growing to 10,000 function points or 1,000,000 logical code statements. Structured development replaced and was better than “cowboy programming” and somewhat better than the later waterfall method. However, in time, other methodologies such as iterative development, object-oriented development, and spiral development would begin to displace structured development. Today, many newer methodologies are in competition: Agile, container development, continuous development, DevOps, model-driven development, and many more. However, the fundamental principles of structured development are still valid in 2016 and implicitly assumed by other methodologies, even if not acknowledged.
