Iterative / Incremental
Drive Innovation through Flexibility with PTC Integrity
Iterative and Incremental development methodologies such as UP (Unified Process), RUP (Rational Unified Process) or Spiral Development are successful because they offer some of the advantages of pure Agile while providing more structure similar to traditional processes. They promote shorter development cycles, frequent releases and more involvement from users to reduce risk, improve quality and improve the organization's ability to adapt to changing requirements. They also offer flexibility in both process and formality, enabling organizations to adapt processes to the relevant standards and regulations and scale them to large development efforts.
These benefits, however, can be difficult to achieve using traditional siloed tooling. Rapid cycles or iterations demand streamlined activities, cross-discipline teams and improved communication. This creates unique demands from their development lifecycle management tools:
| Challenge | PTC Integrity Capability |
|---|---|
| Moving development to shorter iterations requires teams to maximize
efficiency and reduce overhead. Relying on a collection of tools and
manual documentation results in redundancies and inefficiencies that
reduce team productivity and velocity. |
|
| Iterative development demands cross-discipline teams, including stakeholders, to maximize communication. Traditional domain specific tools that encourage silos are not compatible with this philosophy, and undermine the effectiveness of this method. |
|
| A collection of discipline specific tools and manual documentation undermines the flexibility of iterative development methodologies. Tools must be capable of being adapted quickly and easily |
|
| In the rapid turnaround of Iterative development, management needs to
immediately identify and react to issues and impediments. This demands
real-time visibility across the project |
|
| Iterative development methodologies like RUP emphasize the utilization
of Use Cases to drive development. Traditional tools may be able to
capture use cases, but are unable to effectively manage the flowdown of
use cases into design, test and code as well as manage frequent change
impacts across the lifecycle |
|
| Managing risk as relating risks to development artifacts is also common
in iterative development methods. Most traditional tools do not allow
for integrated risk management and therefore lack the traceability and
reporting capabilities to efficiently manage risk in the context of a
fast paced iterative process |
|
| Compliance to development and engineering standards and industry
regulations can decrease efficiency and push out cycle times, especially
when relying on manual documentation or federated tools |
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