> "Structure for serial, incremental results" This bit was the surprise to me that it was a new lesson to someone who posts on Hacker News. It's a lesson that

> "Structure for serial, incremental results" This bit was the surprise to me that it was a new lesson to someone who posts on Hacker News. It's a lesson that 'conventional' project people haven't learned but it's Agile 101. It's the absolute basis and core of agile - don't do everything all at once, progressing together and delivering at the end. Instead do the first thing all the way through, and then the next thing. Doing it has many many benefits: You can stop at any time and have something useful You get to decide whether subsequent things you thought you wanted were actually right and can add/remove/change them You get to take learnings from earlier things and use them when doing later things[1] As client (stakeholder) you get actual deliverables so you can judge actual progress, with no room for 'fudging' [1] This is important and not talked about much with Agile. If you do Waterfall you do your design all at once and don't get a chance to learn any lessons. If you do Agile, you build the first thing and learn some more about your problem and the solutions. You are then better prepared for the second thing, which leaves you even better prepared for the third thing etc. This includes even changing what you thought you were going to do for later things.