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Agile approaches like Scrum are often described as iterative but we seem to forget where iteration really benefits us and how to plan for iteration when compared to incrementing.

Iteration is a strategy for discovering a requirement by building software and soliciting feedback. By travelling through this cycle a few times you home in on the true customer need. Where there is a high degree of complexity of uncertainty this feedback driven approach is likely to be more cost effective that attempting to completely analyse the requirement.

By contrast an incremental approach involves building a part of a solution completely followed by the next part.
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I described here some of the ideas that Tob Gilb shared with me and one of my consulting clients. Following this session we decided to apply his impact estimation model to drive the project. In this post I will show how this manifested, provide some examples and describe how we have used the technique and what we have learnt.
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I’ve been fortunate enough to work along side Rachel Davies over the past few weeks, and for the next few. Rachel and I have been discussing coaching styles and I felt I could add further perspective to her recent post – here.
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In July I was lucky enough to get to an agile event arranged by exoftware. The event hosted in London was my first opportunity to hear two very significant players in the agile movement speak.

The first speaker was Kent Beck talking about test driven development and a concept that he termed software health. As a software engineer first and formost I am particularly interest in any approach that claims to improve quality. Kent was claiming more that this.

The term software health covered, in addition to quality, attributes such as flexibility to change, resiliance against regression and maintainability.

The second speaker was Mary Poppendiek. This was my first exposure to “Lean” thinking. Lean seems to me to underpin agile. Lean is a set of guiding principles that originated in the late 1970′s in the development of the Toyota Production System. Since then the same ideas have been rolled into many manufacturing businesses and also other areas such as logistics. Mary has taken these ideals and applied a software spin. After hearing what Mary had to say I went and bought her book and would recommend it to anyone interested in agile.