Agile Science - how to boost scientific discovery, reduce waste & have more fun doing science.

Agile Science is a practical guide to both practising and reporting scientific discoveries. It aims to boost scientific discovery, while increasing the efficiency of science through lean practice providing a template for transparently reporting how discoveries are actually made. It is ‘Lean startup’ for science. www.profjoelpe...
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Prof of Cognitive Neuroscience Aphantasia, Hyperphantasia, Intuition, Memory, Agile Science - the Human Imagination.
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[@Aklys]

From my experience Agile has made a mess of software development and other industries that have attempted to apply it. Not because the original principles of Agile were bad but the application of it allows for sloppy messy work and technical debt that never gets paid. How would you avoid these scenarios from occurring in it's application to Science? As many orgs that went down the agile path are moving away from it now. In my opinion agile was never built to replace overarching processes like the waterfall method but to integrate with it.

[@profjoelpearson]

yeah the key to agile science is to limit any sloppiness to the minimum viable experiments in the piloting, then when upscaling to the larger experiments use more traditional methods once things have been de-risked etc. www.agilescience.co/

[@Aklys]

@@profjoelpearson I would probably say most have that intention when initially applying MVPs. But that's not how the human condition usually works. From my experience people will create the MVP with the intention of doing it proper later on, but later on never happens because the march forward doesn't halt to do that, ever. You will move from MVP to MVP (or MVE in your case) without ever having time to return proper if it's like Agile in any other industry. You'd need some form of empowered enforcement team to make sure things are done properly once MVEs are done, so they don't progress beyond intended purpose.

[@profjoelpearson]

@@Aklys in science, we have peer review for papers and grants, and a culture of often critical feedback, which I think help the upscaling part be more reliable and not cut corners. An really interesting possible difference between say testing and building a product/service vs agile science...