Sometimes in the hast to develop new ideas and concepts we tend to disregard prior research that has already proved what we come to the conclusion is a good idea. This is the case for Evolutionary Development/Architecture which many in the DevOps community are touting as the newest and latest trend for development. If we simply did a little research, we would discover that Harvard Business School professor Alan MacCormack and his colleagues Marco Iansiti and Roberto Verganti through their two year research study uncovered four practices that lead to successful software development in the year 2001.
In their two-year research study, they analyzed data from 29 completed projects and identified the characteristics most associated with the best outcomes. (You can read in detail their results in “Four Software-Development Practices That Spell Success.”) What they discovered was that successful development was evolutionary in nature. Companies who would first release a low-functionality version of a product to selected customers at a very early stage of development and then layer on top of it in an iterative fashion, with the design allowed to evolve in response to the customers’ feedback. This approach contrasted with traditional models of software development at the time and their more sequential processes flows. They found that this evolutionary model has been around for several years, but this was the first time the connection has been demonstrated between the practices that support the model and the quality of the resulting product.