In the software world we have been looking for “The Methodology” to solve our software development sorrows for quite a while. We started with Waterfall, then Spiral, Evo, RUP and, more recently with XP, Scrum, Kanban, DAD, SAFe (there are many others, but, their impact, so far, has been limited).

In this tutorial, I'll show why this search for the holy grail is bound to fail--each methodology has strenghts and weaknesses that make it suitable only in some contexts--and I'll describe a different approach based on patterns and pattern languages, that teams can use to create their own methodologies to suit their specific needs, which, in my experience, has a higher chance of success. 

The approach is based on the observation that all the practices used in all modern methodologies--e.g., user stories, use cases, team self organization, TDD, unit testing, acceptance testing, continuous integration, iterative and incremental development, etc.--come from the same set. Different methodologies just mix and match them differently. All those practices can (and many have already been) described as patterns whose relationships with each other form a set of pattern languages.