Blind Alleys and the Case for Incremental Delivery
A friend recently shared a fascinating article about a mistake made by some of the greatest scientific minds of the 19th century. For decades, the best mathematicians and astronomers in the world were convinced there was an undiscovered planet — named Vulcan — orbiting between Mercury and the Sun, hidden from view. The math seemed to demand it. The calculations were elegant. The theory was accepted as fact.
There was no planet.
A Star-Crossed 'Scientific Fact': The Story of Vulcan, Planet That Never Was
Two lines from the article stuck with me.
The first:
"It's easy to forget that there are people behind the data and equations. And when people are involved, there is always room for human error."
The second hit even harder:
"In science, you don't dwell on the blind alleys... but the blind alleys are most of what science actually does. You have to go down the blind alley, you bang your head against that blank wall at the end of it, come back out again and try something else. And that's the real experience."
Read that again. The blind alleys are most of what science actually does.
If that is true for mathematical geniuses armed with the best tools and theories of their age — and it is — why would we expect anything different from the rest of us, laboring in the trenches of real-world software delivery every day? Human error is not a deviation from the process. It is part of the process. It is inevitable, it is normal, and the only question worth asking is how quickly we can recognize it and correct course.
This is exactly where the Agile Manifesto has something important to say:
"Deliver working software frequently — with a preference to the shorter timescale."
The problem with waterfall is that it is built on an assumption of human perfection. The plan is made upfront. The requirements are locked. The timeline is set. And then the team is expected to execute without deviation across months or years. But the longer the gap between software releases, the more complexity accumulates, the more assumptions go unvalidated, and the deeper the blind alleys get before anyone realizes they are in one. By the time the mistake surfaces, the cost of fixing it can be enormous.
Frequent, incremental delivery is the antidote. Not because it eliminates blind alleys — nothing does — but because it shortens them. You go down one, hit the wall, come back out, and try again. Quickly. Before the whole project has committed to the wrong direction. Before the budget is spent. Before the team is exhausted and the stakeholders have lost faith.
Bite off smaller chunks. Go for achievable wins. Deliver working software to production frequently and learn from what it tells you. At its core, that is what Agile is and why it works.
Even the greatest scientific minds in history spent years confidently navigating a blind alley. The difference between them and a waterfall project is that science eventually came back out. It corrected itself. It moved on.
The goal is not to avoid the blind alleys. The goal is to make sure you do not build your entire roadmap around one.
To read more about the planet Vulcan: Vulcan: the Solar System's Ghost Planet by Colin Johnston