Iterative development: the secret to great product launches

Well, isn't iterative development and small batches established and well-known state of art? Am I missing something?

"When to Use Iterative Development

You should use iterative development only on projects that you want to succeed."

-- Martin Fowler, UML Distilled

It should be stated that iterative development does come with a cost in that it takes longer to execute than the ideal case sequential development. You trade risk reduction for more work.

Ironic then that the example in the article is Falcon 1, for which they literally kept making changes on until it stopped crashing.

This is the conventional wisdom, but in my n=1 experience, I have never seen the “ideal case sequential development” actually work in the wild.

The ideal case presumes that everything is known when the sequential development is planned, which is what permits it to be optimized.

But in my n=1 experience, everything is not known, the development team is constantly discovering new information, requirements change, and the ideal plan never works out as originally envisioned, whether we tried to develop sequentially or not.

But the “ideal” plan is often like highly optimized code: Expensive to change. So it has its own cost that cannot be escaped. So I am left extremely cynical about the “ideal sequential development” approach.

It always seems at the outset to be cheaper and faster, but ends up being expensive and inflexible.

JM2C.

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Now if you want something REALLY expensive, I give you “Scrumfall,” a plan where you combine the costs of iterative development with the inflexibility and attendant costs of fixed date, fixed scope, and attempt to optimize sequential development.

But hey, you get to wear an “agile” badge, even though “inspect and adapt” has no place in the process.