Karl Popper's critical rationalism in agile software development

Mandy Northover

Andrew Boake

Derrick G. Kourie

pp. 360-373

in: Pascal Hitzler, Peter Øhrstrøm (eds), Conceptual structures: inspiration and application, Berlin, Springer, 2006

Abstract

Sir Karl Popper's critical rationalism – a philosophy in the fallibilist tradition of Socrates, Kant and Peirce – is applied systematically to illuminate the values and principles underlying contemporary software development. The two aspects of Popper's philosophy, the natural and the social, provide a comprehensive and unified philosophical basis for understanding the newly emerged "agile" methodologies. It is argued in the first four sections of the paper – Philosophy of Science, Evolutionary Theory of Knowledge, Metaphysics, and The Open Society – that the agile approach to software development is strongly endorsed by Popper's philosophy of critical rationalism. In the final section, the relevance of Christopher Alexander's ideas to agile methodologies and their similarity to Popper's philosophy is demonstrated.

Cited authors

Kant Immanuel

Popper Karl

Alexander Christopher

Socrates

Peirce Charles Sanders