Chapter 16. Typical Iteration Plans

This chapter offers an overview of three typical iteration plans, one for each of the first three phases of the process.

The disciplines presented in sequence from Chapter 8 through Chapter 15 may wrongly give an impression of a waterfall process. Remember that the disciplines are merely logical groupings of related activities; the activities in the disciplines are revisited again and again at each iteration and partially re-executed. The actual work performed on a project varies depending on the nature of the project and where you are in the lifecycle.

In Chapter 3 we introduced the concept of the typical iteration plan, which describes the work that is performed as the project goes through one iteration. In this chapter, we give three examples of typical iteration plans:

• An iteration in the inception phase to define the project vision and the business case

• An iteration early in the elaboration phase to build an architectural prototype

• An iteration late in the construction phase to implement the system

These examples are skeletal and do not involve all activities from all disciplines and workflows.