It's All Iterative 8
People say “we don’t do iterative”. Sometimes it is a prideful thing, more often a kind of self-effacing confession. However, you and I know that it’s not true. All software development is iterative, it’s a matter of granularity.
When working on the very first 1.0 release of a product, developers and managers may think that they’re not doing iterative work, but any idiot knows that they’re not writing all the code at once. They couldn’t possibly. They’re not releasing yet, but they’re appending functionality every day.
They try to design all at once, but that’s just for 1.0. Software is like a plan: it never survives contact with the real world unscathed.
After 1.0 do we cancel the project? If so, it’s a failure. After 1.0 is 1.0.1 or 1.1 or 2.0. The project continues and continues to receive new appendages and improvements. Isn’t the whole idea of “next release” an iteration?
Since you’re really iterating anyway, why not capture the data that iterating produces, and why not take advantage of the integration and testing opportunities that iterating will give us? And why not have useful feedback loops? And why not measure our progress as we go? And for that matter, why not go for smaller measured periods so we can judge trends more reliably?
When we say “it isn’t an incremental and iterative effort” we are really saying that we’re denying a basic truth, and choosing not to use the data it produces for us. Not intentionally, but almost certainly.
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I think what you’re really saying is that we all do things piecemeal, not iterative.
When I think iterative, it has the following characteristics: - Time boxed - Fixed time boxes (2, 3, 4 weeks, you pick and stick with it) - We prefer to finish “at the end” and will take away work to make the finish - Do less with more (have more people working of fewer things rather than having a lot of things “almost done”) - “Complete” in this context includes at least: tested, written, integrated with rest of code, checked in, all tests passing, conforms to user acceptance tests for the iteration.
I would argue that most people (even those with 3-week iterations) are following more of a cargo cult than actually working incrementally and iteratively.
Incremental or iterative? You put more meanings on the words than I do. Certainly I didn’t mean all of the things you meant. All I wanted to do was to point out that we don’t “complete” a project. We’re all doing incremental work (adding to that which exists) and we all iterate (revisit existing work) and by those minimal definitions, all our work should be conducted with the future firmly in mind.
The only time we’re not doing Incremental work is when we do the final revision of a throw-away script. And that’s only true provided we don’t improve it later. That’s mighty rare stuff, and so a generalization such as “it’s all iterative” should tell us to go ahead and treat our code as if it has a multi-visit, multi-change lifecycle.
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The project continues and continues to receive new appendages and improvements. Isn’t the whole idea of “next release” an iteration?
They couldn’t possibly. They’re not releasing yet, but they’re appending functionality every day.
Yes i agree with your article. Thanks
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We had the whole Skateboard thing at the same time.
So what can we do to improve?