Is Your Agile Team Incremental, or Iterative?

“Waterfall until it hits the development team” is still waterfall.

Photo by Mike Lewis HeadSmart Media on Unsplash

At the heart of Agile Development are two key concepts:

• Increments — where work is broken down into tangible pieces completed within the bounds of a Sprint. Each increment is a building block toward the larger project and facilitates the gradual release of functionality.
• Iteration — the cyclical process where the product evolves through each successive Sprint. With the release of each increment, the team gathers feedback and adapts the project or feature based on that feedback.

Many teams new to Scrum adopt Increments fairly readily, as the concept is reinforced by the structure of the Sprint and its Events. However breaking functionality into two-week slices doesn’t make much of a difference if you’re still front-loading all of the preparatory work, delaying all of the feedback until the very end of the project, or not having the outcome of each Sprint influence the next: completely missing the second key concept of iteration.

For a team operating with only increments, there’s no guarantee that any of what the development team has spent so much effort on is valuable. These teams run into trouble because while they’re attempting to adopt an Agile way of working, the rest of the business is still running in their former waterfall mindset.

Adopting incremental development without iterating looks like a waterfall.

The iterative, truly agile team doesn’t start with a final picture of what they will build. Instead of working on a fully specced out feature with wireframes and architecture locked-in beforehand, they have a clear objective and a metric for measuring progress towards that objective. Each Sprint, instead of creating a polished, complete feature, they’re building something they can learn from. Their outputs are stepping stones towards the final product, which may or may not look like what people first imagined but will be much more valuable.

The successfully iterative team’s Sprint Goals are focused on outcomes, and the team has the flexibility to figure out how to reach each outcome…