What was most surprising was how many different kinds of tools could be used effectively with them, including even spreadsheets and word processors. The tool requirements for profiting from these techniques is very low. The third technique consistently encountered in successful projects was incremental development, used to manage the scheduling and staging of the system. Nonetheless, relatively few of the managers we encountered used or understood the mechanics of incremental development. There appeared to be two reasons for this.
Incremental development is so important that it deserves an entire article to itself.
I shall describe it in a following article in another issue. Responsibilities and use cases excel in an economic and natural way. They are simple and effective. They have low entry cost in tools. They integrate well with incremental development and with the proposed design patterns.