Do you do Incremental Design ?

January 14, 2008 by sureshkrishna

Incremental Design is one of the core values of the XP. Many favor to have a "rough up-front design" rather than the "big up-front design". The days when the Design is a single long term process is gone (as in waterfall or v-model) and developers are embracing the design as an integrated daily process.

Software development has taught us to know that the "requirements change" and we need to live with it. When requirements change, the design too changes. We often hear that "the design need to be flexible enough", but not practical in all cases. The software design is often a function of the designer's technical and system/business knowledge. Its very difficult to predict and assume some of the changing requirements in advance.

With the 30 day Sprints and story cards, team knows the requirements to be fulfilled and what direction the direction is going towards. This makes it easy for the developers to concentrate on their modules and do a short, simple and rough up-front design.

Do we see the Incremental Design as a step ahead from the conventional big up-front design ? Does Incremental Design throws any challenges ?

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