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Agility in different domains

Agility

Working with agile processes is a best practice approach by now for the software development industry. It allows for small but fast steps towards a greater goal of a project or product vision. You could also apply agile thinking to research projects. Classical research is not that different from an agile process, nay? You take some small step, test a hypothesis, evaluate the result and continue with a next step.

Agility in science

But there is a fundamental difference in the concept of these processes: research allows to dismiss one or even several of the previous steps. In software development you normally don’t throw away the artifacts you built to move where you are now. For research to be agile it needs to be allowed to discard previous steps, or as Alfred North Whitehead said in “Adventures of ideas”:

A science that hesitates to forget its founders is lost.

It’s part of changing paradigms in the classical sense of Thomas S. Kuhn’s ideas in “The structure of scientific revolutions”.

There and back again

Having broadened the view on agility for research, let’s look back at software development. In agile sprints your teams makes decisions that will influence the path of the whole product. So you eventually make fast paced decisions whose effects will stay for a long time. Most software development teams are prepared to make quick technological decisions based on the problem at hand. They are normally not prepared to make estimates on the long term feasability of said decisions.

Take away

So you may accumulate technological debt even if you try to avoid. Take some pressure out of the technological decision making process by allowing for revision of architectural decisions. And last but not least establish a culture allowing to make errors. Because being under pressure to avoid errors and increase velocity makes developers susceptible for making errors. But this is a topic for another post.

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