History
Walk down memory lane
Methods are fashion with consequences. Waterfall, RUP, RAD, and Agile each answered a different failure mode. Understanding the sequence is how you spot what is coming back around.
Section overview · Oct 6, 2026
Waterfall
Sequential phases, heavy upfront specification, change as exception. Still correct when the cost of wrong interface is catastrophic — and still misapplied when the market is the uncertain part.
RUP — Rational Unified Process
Iterative phases with risk-driven use cases, architecture first, and ceremony that scaled for large organizations. Ancestor of a thousand “Agile but with gates” hybrids.
RAD — Rapid Application Development Spotlight
Prototypes, user workshops, timeboxes, and reusable components — the 1990s answer to waterfall drag. Agent-era tools make RAD’s promises newly cheap. Read the full RAD article →
Agile
Working software over comprehensive documentation — then two decades of scaling frameworks, story points, and cargo-cult standups. Still the default language of teams; still incomplete without architecture and governance.
Why history now
Agents recycle old debates
Vibe coding reopens RAD vs requirements. Factory orchestration reopens RUP’s risk phases. Auto-merge reopens waterfall’s change-control instincts. Memory lane is not nostalgia — it is a map.
Also in this issue
Vibe vs requirements editorial
How teams should think about tooling categories when one-shot demos stop being enough.
Underwrite the methods series — placeholder only.