Agile design, evolution in living organisms, and antifragility share similarities in how they approach problem-solving and adapting to change.
Evolution is a process by which organisms adapt to changing environments through:
- Mutations: the gradual accumulation of small changes
- Exaptation: the radical repurposing of an existing behaviour or structure
The ability of an organism to adapt and evolve is critical to its survival and success.
Similarly, Agile design is based on the principle of iterative development. Small, incremental changes are made to the software through a series of iterations, allowing the development team to adapt to changing requirements or unexpected problems quickly.
Incremental updates, however, might not always be enough. Where old methods fail, repurposing existing technology for new needs (through an exaptation process) is vital, and Agile design must facilitate exaptation processes to be effective.
Antifragility is a concept introduced by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his seminal book Antifragile — Things That Gain From Disorder. It refers to a property of complex systems that allows them to benefit from volatility and disturbances rather than being harmed by them.
Antifragile systems can adapt and become stronger in response to stressors, interpreted here as valuable information about environmental changes. Similarly, Agile design allows teams to incorporate customer feedback into future releases.
Delaying customer feedback will provide stability in the short run (until the customer starts using the software). Nevertheless, it will fail catastrophically in the long term as developers might design an unusable product. In this case, the absence of evidence (for customer dissatisfaction) must not be interpreted as evidence of absence.
In Antifragile systems, heuristics and experimentation can be employed to create a robust system that can adapt to and benefit from volatility and disturbances. A fail-fast, fail-often approach, where the system is designed to identify and recover from failures quickly, can also be employed to increase the system’s resilience to stressors.
Furthermore, a Design for Failure approach, where the system is designed to anticipate and mitigate potential failure scenarios, can increase the system’s antifragility.
The concept of embracing change and uncertainty is also reflected in DevOps practices, prioritising the integration of development and operations teams to enable faster and more efficient release cycles.
Adapting and evolving in software design and living organisms is critical to success and survival.
While an Agile design approach achieves this ability through iterative development and close customer collaboration, antifragility achieves it by embracing change and uncertainty and building redundancy and flexibility.