Agile Methodology and War Strategies

Cătălin Tudose

The history of humankind offers lots of remarkable ideas and innovations in strategy and tactics. There is no area where people have shown more inventiveness than defending themselves or attacking and conquering others. On the other hand, the Agile methodology emerged from software development, where it tried to provide support for the successful organization of delivery projects, that have to fight and conquer the complexity. This article evidences similarities between the Agile methodology and attacking and war strategies, making extended references to one of the most renowned military treaties: Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. Making inter-disciplinary analogies, comparing and contrasting the concepts from different disciplines are at the core of this article.

We’ll investigate what things as initial estimations, attack by stratagem, tactical dispositions, energy, weak points, and strong points, maneuvering, variation in tactics, the army on the march, terrain, arriving on unknown ground, concrete situations on the ground, the use of spies, or what the attack by fire may mean in software development. We'll analyze how these war strategy concepts transpose to Agile concepts like adding business value, getting to the business goals, managing complexity, conducting the work the incremental and non-incremental way.

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