Abstract:Software constitutes the infrastructure of an information society, and the production and utilization of software systems become a core competency. A software development method embodies a systematic set of processes and techniques enabling the engineering of software systems. This paper briefly reviews some most important software development methods thrived in the last five decades, including fundamental methods based on structured programming and modular development, object-oriented methods, software reuse and component-based methods, aspect-oriented methods, model-driven methods, and service-oriented methods. After that it gives an outlook with an introduction to the research efforts on Internetware and a call for future software development methods for emerging social-cyber-physical systems.