Ideas Over Solutions

Canned solutions and standard recipes usually come in the form of closed proprietary commercial solutions. They tend to be all-inclusive template solutions trying to provide guidance for most or all present and foreseeable situations. As such they are expected to be tailored-down for each specific use, by external experts, typically in a top-down fashion. See Information for decision-makers considering large consultancy firms’ Agile offering and Information for decision-makers considering the SAFe framework .

Canned solutions and standard recipes work well for complicated well known and understood problems where defined plan-driven processes like Waterfall are a good fit.

Ideas like Agile heuristics, patterns, practices, and frameworks instead get commonly shared, debated, tried out, adapted to the context and circumstances and needs at hand, evolved and sometimes re-invented by those doing the work in the trenches. These ideas tend to be shared and evolve collaboratively in the open as in the Open Source movement. See the Community of Needs and also The Cathedral and the Bazaar .

Evolving ideas for specific needs instead work well with complex problems, uncertainty and novelty where adaptive empirical approaches like Agile are a good fit.