Library · Tag

Iteration

An annotated collection of 3 books & papers on iteration, spanning 1970 to 2011. Featuring works by Winston W. Royce, Craig Larman & Victor R. Basili, Eric Ries — each with editorial commentary oriented to digital product practice.

Managing the Development of Large Software Systems

Winston W. Royce, 1970 · Proceedings of IEEE WESCON

The paper usually cited as the birth of waterfall, and almost always misread. Royce diagrams the linear sequence — requirements, design, code, test, deploy — and immediately writes that this approach is "risky and invite…

Iterative and Incremental Development: A Brief History

Craig Larman & Victor R. Basili, 2003 · IEEE Computer, Vol. 36, No. 6

Larman and Basili walk through forty years of software projects that used iterative and incremental development — from Mercury and the early space programme through shuttle avionics to the first large commercial systems…

Ries popularised a vocabulary — MVP, pivot, validated learning, build-measure-learn — that became the lingua franca of startups in the 2010s. Strip away the evangelism and the argument is tight: when uncertainty is high,…