Releases

Often a product is too big to put into the wild all at once. It might also be the case that while we could release the whole thing into the wild we might want to take smaller steps for a number of reasons:
 * Some things are not well defined and won't be so without further research
 * Some things are not well defined and won't be until users see something
 * We can define a subset of valuable functionality we can make available sooner rather than making the whole product available in a "big bang."

For all of these reasons, we might select a subset of user-valued functionality and make it available first. We then might pick a second subset of user-valued functionality and release it next. We could continue this until:
 * The users are satisfied
 * We run out of money to continue development

Where a product might take a year or more to finish, a release might be anywhere from 2 - 6 months. If I have an amount of work I think will require something between 1 and 2 years of work, the I might break this up into 3 to 6 releases (give or take a few).

A release should not be confused with an Iteration.