Agile Glossary

Iterative Development

What is Iterative Development?

Agile projects are iterative insofar as they intentionally allow for “repeating” software development activities, and for potentially “revisiting” the same work products (the phrase “planned rework” is sometimes used; refactoring is a good example).

They are iterative in a third, less essential sense, in being most often structured around a series of iterations of fixed calendar length. However, some Agile approaches to scheduling, such as Kanban do away with iterations in this later sense, but retain the other aspects of multiple repetitions and planned rework.

Nearly all Agile projects are incremental as well as iterative. However, it is possible to use iterative strategies which are not also incremental; for instance, a “build it twice” strategy in which one first creates a throwaway prototype to gather user feedback, then uses insights from that experience to build the “real thing”. Prototyping is necessarily an iterative strategy and may have been a precursor to the development of iterative software development ideas.

Origins

The idea of iterative development predates Agile – by at least a decade or two.

  • 1984: an early empirical study by Barry Boehm of projects using prototyping, by essence an iterative strategy, suggests that iterative approaches first started receiving serious attention around that time, most probably driven by factors such as the rise of personal computers and graphical user interfaces
  • 1986: in a well-known paper, Barry Boehm presents “A Spiral model of software development and enhancement“, an iterative model geared to identifying and reducing risks through any appropriate approaches (though the “typical” example presented is based on prototyping)
  • 1995: an article by Alistair Cockburn, “Growth of human factors in application development“, suggests one major reason why iterative approaches gradually gain acceptance: the bottleneck in software development is shifting to (individual and organizational) learning, and human learning is intrinsically an iterative, trial and error process
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Additional Agile Glossary Terms

An acceptance test is a formal description of the behavior of a software product, generally expressed as an example or a usage scenario. A number of different notations and approaches have been proposed for such examples or scenarios.
Test-driven development (TDD) is a style of programming where coding, testing, and design are tightly interwoven. Benefits include reduction in defect rates.
The team meets regularly to reflect on the most significant events that occurred since the previous such meeting, and identify opportunities for improvement.
A product backlog is a list of the new features, changes to existing features, bug fixes, infrastructure changes or other activities that a team may deliver in order to achieve a specific outcome.
An acceptance test is a formal description of the behavior of a software product, generally expressed as an example or a usage scenario. A number of different notations and approaches have been proposed for such examples or scenarios.
Test-driven development (TDD) is a style of programming where coding, testing, and design are tightly interwoven. Benefits include reduction in defect rates.
The team meets regularly to reflect on the most significant events that occurred since the previous such meeting, and identify opportunities for improvement.

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