What’s Really Different About Agile—On Large Projects?

ABOUT THIS CHAPTER   The naturalist Stephen Jay Gould tells a story in which two girls are talking on the playground (Gould, 1977). One girl says, “What if a spider was as big as an elephant? Wouldn’t that be scary?” The other girl responds, “No. If a spider was as big as an elephant, it would look like an elephant, silly.”

Gould goes on to explain that the second girl is right because the sizes of the organisms significantly dictate what the organisms look like. A spider can float through the air without injuring itself because friction from the air is a stronger force than gravity. But an elephant is too heavy to fly. Gravity is a much stronger force than friction at its size. A spider can discard and secrete a new exoskeleton as it grows because it’s small, but an elephant is too large to withstand the period between shedding an exoskeleton and regrowing it, so it must have ...