Planning to make use of learning – Incremental vs Iterative

During coffee with Agile-coach and all-round excellent guy Shane Clauson, in sympathy with yet another of my what’s-wrong-with-agile rants, he pointed me to this blog post from Jeff Patton:

Don’t know what I want, but I know how to get it

While my opinions diverge on some of what he says must be true, I think the important message that he (and others – Check Alistair Cockburn’s writing on this) make is that it pays to plan to iterate. That is, if you’re on an agile project and you don’t see anyone planning to rework things in response to feedback from using the product, you’re probably in for some disappointment.

I think we frequently fail to give our customers an appropriate expectation when it comes to (agile) software development. Having them read this isn’t a bad start, but you’ll want to figure out how to make this message your own.