Iterative and Incremental Development

Iterative and Incremental development is any combination of both iterative design or iterative method and incremental build model for development. The combination is of long standing and has been widely suggested for large development efforts such as in the 1985 DOD-STD-2167 mentions in section 4.1.2 "During software development, more than one iteration of the software development cycle may be in progress at the same time." and "This process may be described as an "evolutionary acquisition" or "incremental build" approach." The relationship between iterations and increments is determined by the overall software development methodology and software development process. The exact number and nature of the particular incremental builds and what is iterated will be specific to each individual development effort.

Software development process
Activities and steps
  • Requirements
  • Specification
  • Architecture
  • Design
  • Implementation
  • Testing
  • Debugging
  • Deployment
  • Maintenance
Methodologies
  • Waterfall
  • Prototype model
  • Incremental
  • Iterative
  • V-Model
  • Spiral
  • Scrum
  • Cleanroom
  • RAD
  • DSDM
  • RUP
  • XP
  • Agile
  • Lean
  • Dual Vee Model
  • TDD
Supporting disciplines
  • Configuration management
  • Documentation
  • Quality assurance (SQA)
  • Project management
  • User experience design
Tools
  • Compiler
  • Debugger
  • Profiler
  • GUI designer
  • IDE
  • Build automation

Iterative and incremental development are essential parts of the Modified waterfall models, Rational Unified Process, Extreme Programming and generally the various agile software development frameworks.

It follows a similar process to the plan-do-check-act cycle of business process improvement.

Read more about Iterative And Incremental Development:  The Basic Idea

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