Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Iterative development

A team in my workplace been working on a, sorry, struggling with a product development initiative for the last three years now.
They have been doing iterative development on a fixed bid assignment for a product development initiative with no well defined scope. I know you must be thinking this is the perfect recipe for disaster.
Well, here is what i found out that is wrong with the way they were doing this.
Iterative development has been taken way too seriously. Everything from requirements is being iterated. Before you start thinking "Thats the way it is supposed to be!", let me tell you what I think is the difference.
In a normal world, iterative development is about iteratively 'Completing' your work in smaller chunks. The way theyhave been doing this, they have never 'Completed' anything! There is always something remaining in everything that will be iteratively developed. For instance, a piece of code has been in development for the last three years with the developer iteratively making changes to the code to add functionality bit by bit!
Shocking? you bet it is!
The result is that no code has ever stabilized in the last three years leading to hundreds and hundreds of defects.
This has been a hard lesson for the development team.

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