Incremental Development Quotes

Incremental change does not change lives.

The Waterfall Model is wrong and harmful; we must outgrow it.

I'm a plodder, not a planner.

Changing the world doesn't happen all at once. It isn't a big bang. It's an evolution, the sum of a billion tiny sparks. And some of those sparks will have to come from you.

Little changes are the enemies of great changes.

For centuries the most powerful argument for God's existence from the physical world was the so-called argument from design: Living things are so beautiful and elegant and so apparently purposeful, they could only have been made by an intelligent designer. But [Charles] Darwin provided a simpler explanation. His way is a gradual, incremental improvement starting from very simple beginnings and working up step by tiny incremental step to more complexity, more elegance, more adaptive perfection.

We are so prone to expect to become good Christians by some sudden experience that lifts us all at once to higher ground without the gradual climb. We forget that we are to "grow in grace" and that normal growth is not a matter of fits and starts.

I'm an advocate of evolutionary, not revolutionary, changes.

All habits gather by unseen degrees.

Time and reflection... modify, little by little, our vision, and at last comprehension comes to us.

If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.

Progress is not accomplished in one stage.

The management question, therefore, is not whether to build a pilot system and throw it away. You will do that. Hence plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow.

Science does not emerge in some perfect, complete crystalline form.

I'm not a 'big picture' sort of guy. I prefer making small improvements each day.

I work very slowly. It's like building a ladder, where you're building your own ladder rung by rung, and you're climbing the ladder. It's not the best way to build a ladder, but I don't know any other way.

All the great and beneficent operations of Nature are produced by slow and often imperceptible degrees. The work of destruction and devastation only is violent and rapid.

Specifically, in the software industry, progress is highly sequential: progress is typically made through a large number of small steps, each building on the previous ones.

Slowly, painstakingly, like ants, men would make their paths and civilization and their wars once again, only to have it wash away again.

Arts and sciences are not cast in a mould, but are found and perfected by degrees, by often handling and polishing.

The Sims is kind of an interesting case because we had all these expansion packs. We were able to incrementally add on and explore without invading the core dynamic or the core game play.

This idea of repetition and revision is central to my working process-this idea of stacking and layering and building up densities and recoveries.