Traditional ways of working, like waterfall, tell us to complete all the work in a stage before we move on to the next one. At the end of this process, we finally deliver something to our customers, and we hope that it meets their needs. Agile thinking is changing this and asks us to deliver incrementally. An increment is a done product or service that we deliver to our customers at the end of an iteration. But how do we do this? And is incremental delivery really that much better than traditional methods? To find out, we invited three people to do the coin challenge. Let's see how they did. 

So what did we just see? Our participants flipped each coin and created a stack of coins before they could pass it on. Each coin flip represented work being done, with the stacks being phases of our waterfall process. Working this way meant that the people down the line were blocked by the people who were flipping and creating stacks before them. They had to wait until a coin stack finally came their way and were only working once an entire phase had been completed. This also meant that it took quite a bit of time for coin stacks to make their way all the way to the very end of the process. Now, let's check out how this same process could be done incrementally.

As we just saw, incremental delivery was quite a bit faster than its waterfall counterpart because our participants were passing on each coin as soon as it was flipped. This meant that everyone was able to get involved in incremental delivery much more quickly. Crucially, the same amount of work was being done. The coins were still flipped the same number of times in both challenges. The big difference is that the coin stacks were only created at the end of the process when work is considered done instead of trying to get a done state for every phase of the project. Working incrementally helped our team to deliver the done increment more quickly by getting the whole team involved in the work sooner. Agile ways of working and thinking encourages us to work in this way because it means that we can get a working product or service into our customer's hands quickly. We can get their feedback and move into the next iteration to continually improve.