TITLE: Agile Approaches and the Small
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: April 21, 2011  8:10 PM
DESC: 
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BODY:
Seth Godin recently blogged on the
<A HREF="http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2011/04/economies-of-smal.html">
   economies of small</A>:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
I think we embraced scale as a goal when the economies
of that scale were so obvious that we didn't even need
to mention them.  Now that it's so much easier to
produce a product in the small and market a product in
the small, and now that it's so beneficial to offer a
service to just a few, with focus and attention,
perhaps we need to rethink the very goal of scale.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

Agile approaches to software development exploit the
economies of small:
<UL>
<LI> small promises </LI>
<LI> short cycles </LI>
<LI> small teams </LI>
<LI> small steps </LI>
<LI> small changes </LI>
<LI> continuous integration </LI>
</UL>

Traditional software engineering, based as it is on an
engineering metaphor, seems invested in traditional
economies of scale.  That was a natural result of the
metaphor bust also the tools of the time.  Back when
hardware and software made it more difficult to write
software rapidly over short iterations, scale in the
traditional sense -- large -- helped to make processes
and maybe even people more efficient.

Things have changed.
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