Iterative and Incremental Development: A Brief History

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 — and demolish the myth that iteration is a recent invention of "agile". The paper's value is historical and polemical in equal parts: every practice celebrated today was already practised somewhere, and the dominance of waterfall was always narrower than the literature suggested. For product direction the piece is humbling — many of the "new" ideas you are asked to adopt are older than most organisations adopting them. It is a useful antidote to amnesia. Read it right after Royce and the picture of how the industry confused itself for decades becomes vivid.