There are a lot of blogs and articles about the differences between incremental and iterative development. In my opinion it does not add much value to write again about the differences 🙂
However, I saw two pictures last week that clearly state the difference for me. The pictures are displayed below… (the pictures on this page are used with permission of Jeff Patton).That’s why I wrote this blog, to share the pictures with you and give you some links about the incremental and iterative development. If you are new to agile development, it could be interesting.
Incremental development, every iteration you add a piece of the complete picture. The picture is ready when all iterations are done.
Iterative development, you deliver a picture and decide if you would like to continue to extend the picture.
There are some interesting and good blogs about the incremental and iterative development:
- Blog of Jeff Patton, http://www.agileproductdesign.com/blog/dont_know_what_i_want.html
- Wikipage, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iterative_and_incremental_development
- Alistair Cockburn, http://alistair.cockburn.us/Incremental+versus+iterative+development3
- Article of Pascal Cauwenberghe in Methods & Tools, http://www.methodsandtools.com/archive/archive.php?id=14
When you have read the above pages, you should have a good understanding of what incremental and iterative development is.