I joined the industry only 20 years ago so missed the heyday of waterfall. I did witness the rise of the RUP though. And I must say that to jr developer me it was very educational despite its rather intimidating volume.
There's one angle I don't see discussed in the last 10 years or so. There was a time when a lot of attention and literature was dedicated to software design. The whole OOP movement, design patterns, the RUP, entire shelves of software architecture books. I'm inclined to call them systematic approaches to building software. I believe feature-driven development was the last such methodology aimed at developers.
Ever since Agile became popular around 2008 I have not seen anything comparable. The OOP school of thought lost its appeal without really being replaced with another well defined body of knowledge. Anything FP-related is extremely community-specific and nobody is really talking casually about, say, monad transformers. Any Agile methodology has very little guidance for developers in comparison with RUP/FDD. It's all about managerial concerns and time tracking.
But there's no question that software development is drastically different now. Using version control (even local one) was not a given in 1999. Unit testing with jUnit in 2001 was a major revelation. And shipping features constantly in SaaS got popular after 2007 or so.
I was never a fan of RUP. But it had the idea of adapting the process to the project. It gave you lots of choices.
With Scrum, every project is approached the same way, and no one thinks if it makes sense or not. McConnell´s "Rapid Development" also gives you alternatives for you to choose. Now days, it is Scrum or sometimes Kanban.
There's one angle I don't see discussed in the last 10 years or so. There was a time when a lot of attention and literature was dedicated to software design. The whole OOP movement, design patterns, the RUP, entire shelves of software architecture books. I'm inclined to call them systematic approaches to building software. I believe feature-driven development was the last such methodology aimed at developers.
Ever since Agile became popular around 2008 I have not seen anything comparable. The OOP school of thought lost its appeal without really being replaced with another well defined body of knowledge. Anything FP-related is extremely community-specific and nobody is really talking casually about, say, monad transformers. Any Agile methodology has very little guidance for developers in comparison with RUP/FDD. It's all about managerial concerns and time tracking.
But there's no question that software development is drastically different now. Using version control (even local one) was not a given in 1999. Unit testing with jUnit in 2001 was a major revelation. And shipping features constantly in SaaS got popular after 2007 or so.