Software Methodologies and War Strategies

Cătălin Tudose

Innovation is permanent in all fields of human activity. Strategy and tactics adopted by one discipline may be used to communicate through disciplines or may be transposed and adapted in other fields. The contemporary activity of software development brought to emerging different methodologies that exercise their influence to other fields and may be applied in other disciplines. On the other hand, as people showed the highest inventiveness in attacking and conquering others, the basic military notions are used across disciplines. Adapting the attacking and war strategies to different fields resulted naturally.

The article will examine the trans-disciplinary communication through the Agile incremental methodology and similarities between its application in software development and adopting it in different fields. We'll analyze how to transpose to other fields Agile concepts as adding business value and getting to the business goals, conducting the work the incremental and non-incremental way, and how the basic concepts from Agile are used beyond their original creation, through other disciplines.

The article also analyzes war strategies and the possibility to apply them to other disciplines, with extended references to one of the most renowned military treaties, Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. We’ll investigate what things as initial estimations, attack by stratagem, tactical dispositions, energy, weak points, and strong points, maneuvering, variation in tactics, the army on the march, terrain, arriving on unknown ground, concrete situations on the ground, the use of spies or the attack by fire may mean to communicate across disciplines.

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