Despite their important luminosity, massive stars keep unveiledmost of their formation mainly because they are deeply embedded withintheir native cloud. This difficulty is accentuated by their small numberand by their larger distances compared to low mass stars.This explains why models for the various stages oftheir formation are still in their infancy.We briefly present here the initial conditions andthe most common models for the formation of massive stars. Also, we focus onto a family of self-similar modelsthat allow accretion and outflows around massive protostars.Finally, we try to sketch the temporal evolution of massive star formation.