Software development via engineering approaches requires effective organization and management of the entire software development process, which resulted in a series of methods to organize and manage the development of software systems. Its original intention is to form a carrier to accumulate and deliver experiences and lessons learned about software development. However, due to some of the intrinsic characteristics (e.g. complexity and invisibility) of software, the software development and organization methods that describe the software development process also naturally have a certain degree of abstraction. As a consequence, many conceptual misleadings and meaningless debates in practice have affected the achievement of the above objectives. For example, it is still lack of reliable means for how to select and define the right software development process to better meet the requirements of a particular project. Moreover, some industry-oriented research reports indicate that the main driving force for process improvement (i.e., the introduction of new tools or methods) in real software projects is anecdotes. This study attempts to clarify some core concepts related to software organization and management, then systematically sorts out the characteristics of software organization and management methods. Meanwhile, based on the history of software development, the reason behind of the method evolution is figured out. On this basis, several findings are discussed and summarized in order to provide references for researchers and practitioners.