Summary (TL;DR;)
- An Increment is the latest stable and usable version of a product
- Professional Scrum Teams create a first Increment during the first Sprint
- During a Sprint, a professional Scrum Team creates one or more Increments
- Multiple Scrum Teams working on the same product create integrated Increments
Introduction
In one of our previous posts, we explained why Scrum Teams must create Done Increments in order to get a benefit from using Scrum. In this post, we'd like to dive a little deeper on what an Increment actually is.
What's an Increment
"An Increment is a concrete stepping stone towards the Product Goal. Each Increment is additive to all prior Increments and thoroughly verified, ensuring that all Increments work together. In order to provide value, the Increment must be usable." – Scrum Guide
The term Increment can be confusing, especially to people who are new to Scrum or agile product development. To make this easier to understand, let's borrow a concept from software that we're all familiar with: versions. An Increment is the latest stable version of a product.
"Latest" means that a product is being developed incrementally, with each Increment being an attempt to be more valuable than the previous one, for example through better functionality. "Stable" means that every Increment meets the Definition of Done and is usable by users.
An Increment is the latest stable version of their product that is usable by the users.
Let's look at some examples of Increments.
Read the full blog post here.