Is Agile development Greedy?

This post is not against Agile development. In fact I love agile development and been using it for 8+ years now.

Lets begin — I am Not sure if someone else felt the same way. Sometimes I feel that Agile development is more of a greedy approach.

Argument goes as below:

• Team always work on the highest business value.
• Closes it and take the next highest item.

There is always a possibility in some project where a solution to less valued business item could be simpler and solves a complex part of higher business value. In other words there could be a global optimal point for the entire problem, but greedy based approach always reaches local maximum/minimum point.

Hence, Agile development => Greedy

Is it Optimal?

We all know that most of the time greedy algorithms are not optimal. But why it is so famous and more people try to adopt it.

Why Greedy based solutions are accepted? I don’t know may be because people (customers) are greedy.

Argument goes as below:

Agile development gave relatively better results than other methodologies.
People(customers/Business) tends evolve from some basic model.
They change very frequently and always wanted to have highest business valued item as early as possible.

Final thoughts

What I feel is Even though Agile development adds more value to customers, it sometimes unnecessarily complicates software engineering.
By keeping the developers more focused on getting things working step-by-step. Innovation or out-of-box thinking are getting reduced especially in Research related environment :-)

May be that is the reason Agile is not followed for every type of projects. My point here is developers/organisations should not just follow the crowd to choose Agile methodology :-)