Iterative vs. Incremental Development

A couple of weeks ago I had an interesting conversation with a co-worker about iterative vs. incremental development and what he felt the differences are. (I'm going to talk about what and how things were discussed, just to let people think about it.)

Iterative developement is where you keep on going over what you have done before and improve, refactor, and build upon what you have done before. Each iteration (should be) better than the one you had before, even if you don't add features. This is important. This (like in XP), requires you have the courage to look at what you did before and refactor what you did before in order to make the app better.

Incremental developement on the other hand is where you keep on adding on what you did before. This is the subtle difference. In incremental you don't go back and refactor what you have done before, you only focus on adding new features and not on improving existing ones. It's a focus on feature count instead of quality.

Needless to say that incremental doesn't sound very good, but I can see how it's possible to get squeezed into that mindset (?) if the customer's only focus is on the number of features they get per $. This isn't "big picture" thinking, nor is it a place that any developer wants to be. I just thought that this is an interesting anti-pattern that would be good to share. It's better to know the bad patterns before you find yourself in them.

Being sick sucks

Laura and I just got back from a vacation and I get home sick. *sigh* So much for a great christmas if I can't socialize with people if I'm sick at home. Grrr....

Tough game

If you think that you have good mouse control, try out this game and let me know how you do. It's funnier if you have the sound on. ;-)

Tough driving

You know that it's going to be hard to get into work for a lot of people when 2 OC transpo slinky buses "ditch it" (ie. get stuck) in one block of the downtown core... Oie.

Best Advice EVER!

I just couldn't help but laughing when I saw this solution to a problem. Okay, we're running out of "cursors" (ie. because we are not managing them properly). Instead of looking into this leak, just make the max # bigger... sooo smart. *cough*

This kind of crap is what gives software people a bad name. :-(

I want it that way...

Okay to watch this video you will need
1) Flash 7
2) A good (fast) connection
3) A change of pants because you will be laughing so hard at 2 chinese students lip sync'ing to Back Street Boys

Enjoy. ;-)

Update: another classic one of a guy in a cube

Three Simple Words

She said yes.