Agile Business Change Blog Thoughts on Agile Strategic Business Change and Agile Delivery

It’s interesting to look at the US Republican Party presidential primaries as an incremental process and to contrast it with the incremental process at the heart of Agile software development.

It seems to me the main advantage of the series of primaries is that it reduces financial commitment and risk, allowing candidates to evaluate their progress through the process without committing to the full investment that a nation-wide “big bang” approach would need.

This is also true of incremental software development – it allows the solution to be developed in a number of increments, with commitment only to the next increment. The contrast with “big bang” software development is that the commitment for a big bang programme is normally to the whole programme.

Risk and financial containment is probably as far as the analogy goes though. The biggest advantage of incremental software development is that it gives early value – early return on investment – allowing parts of the solution to be introduced quickly to start providing business value. As an outsider, there certainly doesn’t seem to be any early value from the primaries.

As an aside, it could also be argued that the primaries allows the stakeholders – the electorate – to carry out parallel testing of alternative solutions to the business problem of who should be their candidate. Developing a number of alternative solutions in parallel is an approach that has been suggested for software development, but not often used, largely because of the number of developers and investment needed.