TITLE: Agile Themes: Organic Planning
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: November 27, 2009 12:40 PM
DESC: 
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BODY:
When I encounter people who are skeptical about agile
software development, one of the common concerns I
hear is about the lack of planning and design in
advance.  How can we create software with a coherent
design when we don't "really" design?  I commented on
this concern a while back when mused about
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2009-01.html#e2009-01-23T13_02_07.htm">
   reactive planning</A>
in AI and software.

Reading last week, I ran across a passage from Lewis
Mumford's book "The City in History" that brought to
mind a similar trade-off between planning upfront and
planning as a system evolves:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
Organic planning does not begin with a preconceived
goal; it moves from need to need, from opportunity to
opportunity, in a series of adaptations that themselves
become increasingly coherent and purposeful, so that
they generate a complex final design, hardly less
unified than a pre-formed geometric pattern.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

One thing I like about this passage is its recognition
that adaptive planning can produce something that is
<EM>coherent</EM> and <EM>purposeful</EM>.  Indeed,
many of us prefer to live in places that have grown
organically, with a minimal amount of planning and
oversight to keep growth from going off-track.  The
result can still feel whole in a way that other
city designs do not.

I know it is dangerous to extrapolate too casually
from other domains into software development, because
the analogy may not be a solid one.  What this passage
offers is something of an existence proof that
adaptation through carefully reactive planning can
produce solid designs in a domain that people know
and understand.  This may help us to overcome initial
resistance to the idea of agile planning of software
long enough that they will give it a try.  The real
proof comes on software projects -- and many of us
have experienced that.
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