Here's the best way I found to explain iterative development to people used to waterfall like processes:
You break the project into a number of small projects. Each subproject must have a clear goal and it must solve at least one end-to-end scenario/feature/etc. Once you break it down, you can apply the waterfall method on each subproject you have. It's as simple as that. Do you know how to handle backward compatibility between major releases? That's pretty much how you handle compatibility between iterations.
How you break the project into subprojects depends a lot on the project, team(s), time constraints, etc. I like short iterations (i.e. subprojects), like 1-2 weeks. I've worked on projects where we had 1-2 day iterations, but that's difficult to do on most projects. Iterations longer than 2-3 weeks tend to become artificial and merge into one big iteration (I don't really understand why that happens, but I've noticed it happens :))
Of course, this short explanation doesn't replace all the good books and articles on agile/iterative development out there. But it gives you a pretty good idea what those books talk about and, even without reading any of that, if you simply apply this simple approach you will still get most of the benefits.
If you really think about it, it's just the old divide&impera applied to the development process.
Vlad
>Ok, I see.
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>I've always used the traditional waterfall method of the lifecycle, so this is new to me.
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>1) What defines an iteration? Is it a period of time, or a series of changes?
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>2) Are changes released to the customer as they're done, or batched and released as a unit?
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>3) How does a project manager keep finished portions from being corrupted? As soon as someone
>starts changing a module, the potential to introduce bubgs is there.
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>4) How are change requests managed? Seems to me that makign changes in an interative model could be confusing.
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>>Yes to both. You add features are they are needed, in the order that the "project owner" specifies. Here's a good book on Scrum that explains how you do this:
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http://www.amazon.com/Agile-Software-Development-SCRUM-Schwaber/dp/0130676349/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2/002-8231173-0302438?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1190150114&sr=8-2>>
>>>Craig, to which of my questions are you answering 'Yes'?
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>>>Are distinct modules developed/finished, or are features added on to the whole project at each iteration?
>>>
