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<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/10/20/interop_whitehurst_gibson/>:

Whitehurst compares the iterative model to kaizen, the Japanese business
philosophy of continuous improvement that lead to the lean manufacturing
techniques first developed at Toyota, and which are now nearly universal
in manufacturing.

With lean manufacturing, you work in small groups, you share designs up
and down the supply chains, and you make incremental changes in products
and improve them gradually. This results in fewer manufacturing defects.

Similarly, the kaizen-like approach to software development embodied in
open source projects (as well as in services such as Salesforce.com)
have lower levels of software defects than big-bang software products.
Whitehurst claimed that he could show that Red Hat's own development
efforts had an order of magnitude fewer defects per lines of code than
big-bang efforts, thanks to the open source model.

There is also an element of aggressive cost cutting to kaizen, which
Whitehurst didn't mention. But he did say that when Delta Airlines was
in bankruptcy at the time he was CIO at the company, the one place that
it was nearly impossible to cut costs was the IT department because of
the nature of the products and the licensing and support contracts with
IT vendors.

Incremental beats big bang.