I have been looking at different programming methodologies: Scrum, waterfall, spiral but someone told about one called Object-Oriented. Now as far as I know that's a paradigm and not a methodology.
If it is a methodology can someone please explain how it differs from Agile or waterfall?
Thanks
Object Oriented programming is a programming technique used when writing code. This is something different from a methodology which is a way of planning, managing and implementing a software project.
see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented%5Fprogramming
Apples and oranges. OO is a way of designing code. Scrum/waterfall/spiral, etc... are about how you manage a project. They're independent of each other.
That said, you really should look into OO.
Back in the day people believed that Object Oriented programming was going to solve world hunger. I suspect that now agile is going to do that, they've lumped them together :-)
Seriously though, although some people took object oriented design to the status of a design methodology - identify actors & behaviours in a formal way to develop the design, it is really a set of principles about how to design software. It certainly isn't a methodology for managing the development of software projects like Scrum and agile might be.
Well, Google found some traces of such a beast which is clearly describing a methodology-like thing:
This document aims at introducing briefly to the readers the Object Oriented Methodology (OOM). Information covered in the document includes a brief overview of the OOM, its benefits, the processes and some of the major techniques in OOM.
OOM is a new system development approach encouraging and facilitating re-use of software components. With this methodology, a computer system can be developed on a component basis which enables the effective re-use of existing components and facilitates the sharing of its components by other systems. Through the adoption of OOM, higher productivity, lower maintenance cost and better quality can be achieved.
This methodology employs international standard Unified Modeling Language (UML) from the Object Management Group (OMG). UML is a modeling standard for OO analysis and design which has been widely adopted in the IT industry.
The OOM life cycle consists of six stages. These stages are the business planning stage, the business architecture definition stage, the technical architecture definition stage, the incremental delivery planning stage, the incremental design and build stage, and the deployment stage.
But this thing didn't spread (likely) very far. Maybe you should ask your contact for some references.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, some authors published work (especially books) with titles and blurbs including the word "method" or "methodology" in them; these works focused on object-oriented modelling approaches, explaining in detail the modelling primitives (metamodel) that one should use to construct structural and dynamic models of systems. Their treatment of the process to follow, however, was minimal. Later, they were criticised by applying the term "methodology".
Nowadays, "methodology" is usually thought of including a process aspect, a modelling (or product) aspect, and a people aspect, at least. The modern methodologies that were built on the tradition of those 1980s-1990s works that I mentioned above are often called "object-oriented", because the modelling approaches that were used then were, in fact, object-oriented.
Actually, it is a debated topic in research circles whether the process aspect of a methodology is substantially different depending on the modelling aspect of said methodology. For example, is the process aspect of an object-oriented method very different from the process aspect of an agent-oriented one? If you think it isn't, then the term "object-oriented methodology" may make no sense to you.