What is Iterative Development

Iterative development, also known as iterative incremental development or iterative evolutionary development, is

a software development process that is the opposite of traditional waterfall development, and which compensates for some of the weaknesses of the

traditional development approach with higher success rates and productivity.

In an iterative development approach, the entire development effort is organized into a series of short

, fixed-length (e.g., 3-week) subprojects called a series of iterations.

Each iteration includes definition, requirements analysis, design, implementation and testing.

With this approach, development work can be initiated before the requirements are fully defined, and a portion of the system's functionality or business logic can be developed in a single iteration

. The requirements are then refined through customer feedback and a new iteration is started.