I remember a while ago on a Stack Overflow podcast Jeff Atwood was talking about the bounty system, and he said that they released the bounty offering code before the bounty awarding code was written as the code would not be needed for a couple of weeks.
Is there a standard term for this? Agile can work in this way but it doesn’t have to. I am thinking of suggesting it to a client for something and would like to use the correct terminology along with any information backing it up as a method.
Essentially the method is to release code with some functionality incomplete as the time until the incomplete functionality is needed is less that the time it will take to develop.
This is IMHO more an opportunity that you get sometimes, not a method: for example delivering a feature allowing subscription to a monthly newsletter at the start of the month and releasing the code to send the newsletter one month later. Doing this is just smart release management (i.e. good priorization of work). Maybe one could call that Opportunistic Development (that’s something you’ll find in Agile literature).