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Iterative Processes

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Development teams need controlled work practices, which integrate the various facets of the development, they need processes capable of:

• Elicit the organization of team activities.
• Depict the tasks of each individual and the interactions with the whole team within those activities.
• Specify the artifacts to be produced by the activities.
• Propose criteria for controlling and evaluating project's artifacts.

Only at these conditions, one can ensure the reliability of a software project.

A lot of project leaders manage their project with proprietary or personal methodologies and processes, but they draw a lot from standard processes commonly used in the object community.

To reduce application complexity and risks related to a complete development, these processes propose an iterative approach. In this approach, the various phases of the project are divided into iterations. An iteration represents a complete and incremental cycle of a phase realization. That means an iteration must produce a usable and executable result, which could be possibly amended by the next iterations of the same phase.

Iterative approach has many advantages:

• That to limit the costs to the strict expenditure related to only one iteration.
• That to limit the risks by evaluating very early the problems and the insufficiencies of the project.
• That to limit the delays in the delivery of the product.
• That to allow the team to work in a effective and dedicated way on well delimited features.
• That to take into account the evolution of the end user or stakeholder requirements.