Agile Development: The Perfect Fit for Mission Critical Applications

I was talking to Ron Morsicato of Agile Rules at dinner at last weekend's Deep Lean conference and he was saying how he thought that Agile was a good idea for mission critical applications. That struck me as an interesting thing, and I've been thinking about that all week. I think he's right and here's why I think so.

Let's say you provide mission critical software and there is a problem reported in the field which requires a fix. Well, if you are doing traditional software development, you can't exactly ask the customer to wait until you finish your current release. And if you were to put out a fix for them using your main development path, that would probably take too long too. So, you have to have a critical-fix development path. By definition, this is a development process which is not used for regular development and it is not used very often (so one would hope).

As a result, you have one process for regular development and one process for critical fixes because your regular development process takes just too darn long. That means that when you most need for things to go smoothly you are going to use the process which is the least practiced and probably also something that only a handful of folks know or are allowed to do. Doesn't that strike you as just plain wrong? Imagine trying to explain that to the media!

Part of the idea with Agile, Lean, and especially Hyper Agile is that the path from deciding to make a change and being able to deliver that same change is as short as reasonably possible. If the "overhead" from start to finish for a critical fix is 4 hours, then any task should take you no more than 4 hours plus however long it takes you to write the code and the associated tests. Once you have this capability, then you really only need one development process which you use for both regular development and critical fixes! Thus, everybody is practiced in your critical fix process and everybody has experience with doing it. This will reduce risk and increase confidence in the results.