Modern Software Engineering: Doing What Works to Build Better Software Faster

6

Incrementalism

Incrementalism is defined as follows: “Incremental design is directly related to any modular design application, in which components can be freely substituted if improved to ensure better performance.”¹

Working incrementally is about building value progressively. Put simply, this is about taking advantage of the modularity or componentization of our systems.

If working iteratively is about refining and improving something over a series of iterations, then working incrementally is about building a system, and ideally releasing it, piece by piece. This is captured beautifully in Figure 6.1, taken from User Story Mapping [Patton].²

Figure 6.1Iterative versus incremental

1. Source: Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_design ...