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Showing posts from July, 2008

World War 2, Rationalism and Agile Development

One of the central values of the Agile Manifesto is Responding to change over following a plan. This doesn't mean that it's not agile to make a plan. You should have a plan, but you should realize the limitations of the plan. Are there any parallels to this in history? The Soviet Union had 5-year plans. Stalin was quite succesful in industrializing the rural country in a short span of time. But his methods did not work well in the battlefield. In the 2nd world war, the Soviet suffered severe losses in the beginning. You can plan how to build and manage a factory, because the complexity is limited. But a war is far more complex. You cannot predict what the enemy is going to do. This doesn't mean that you should go to war without a plan. Far from it, you should plan as much as possible, but be prepared to improvize when something unexpected happens. As Dwight D. Eisenhower , a successful American general in World War 2, said: "Plans are nothing; planning is everything