Adopting Iterative Development: The Perceived Business Value

Iterative development is a common characteristic of agile methods. It is important to understand how the adoption of an iterative process provides business value, and how this value can be used to buy management support to implement other agile techniques. This paper exposes to the community an experience report of a large government agency’s migration from a Waterfall process to an iterative methodology, the Rational Unified Process (RUP). Through field observations and semi-formal interviews with key business partners, we found five main areas of improvement: reestablishment of business involvement, better distribution of acceptance testing effort, introduction of a testing team, less pushback on necessary changes, improved communication and management of expectations.