Generally, it is best to plan, develop and release in small chunks for the following reasons:
- You’d want to get the new features out ASAP into the hands of your users
- It is faster and easier to test small chunks compared to big ones
- Big projects will take forever to release and they usually take 2–4 times longer than anticipated because of complications that almost always arise
- You’d want to start earning sales on what you have developed sooner than later to fund on-going development
- Get feedback from users sooner than later about the usefulness of features developed
- And more
A following 3 books really helped us understand this concept are the following books:
- Getting Real by 37 signals
- The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win
- The Lean Startup
I suggest reading Gettig Real first. It shows you the way to decide which features to develop and which ones to NOT develop. We hurt ourselves in our software development by developing too many features that made our software bulky, fragile and hard to test. We also developed too many features that were not valued by users!
I would recommend reading these books before or during the development of your software to save your self a ton of headache and time.
Hope this helps
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