Iterative Development - Fundamental Ability Part 2
Regarding the fundamental abilities for organizational business agility, apart from the first one — Team Teams, the second ability is iterative development.
Why is it important? Because the core of agility is learning, inspecting and adapting. In the ever-evolving world, how quickly we learn will decide how successful we can be. The scientific learning approach is an iterative process that involves much trial and error.
Iterative vs Incremental
As illustrated in the picture above, iterative development will repeat the same activities to deliver an end-to-end feature ready for the end user to try. Incremental development will build one piece of the whole product that might not be useful for the end user until the whole product is completed. Although sometimes a product may be built iteratively and incrementally, the key difference between them is that,
The product usually can be pivoted through the iterative development according to the learning in each iteration. And the cost of pivoting is relatively low.
Like the picture above, the product evolved and changed in each iteration.
To build iterative development ability, many capabilities need to be built underneath.
