Agile Is A Glass Cannon
A recent shower though of mine is that agile software development might be similar to the strategic concept of a glass cannon in gaming — specifically, that it’s a high-risk high-reward strategy where the risk can be mitigated by skill/experience.
In gaming, a glass cannon is something with very weak defensive capabilities (hence the “glass”) but very strong offensive capabilities (hence the “cannon”). The strategic idea is that if you can survive long enough to get your attacks in, then you will win due to having the superior offence. The difficulty is that you can’t engage your opponents on an equal footing because if you’re both attacking each other then you’re both going to take hits, and your defence is so poor that if you take hits you’re probably going to lose.
To succeed with a glass cannon strategy, you need some kind of non-standard defence. In skill-based competitive games like DotA 2, one such non-standard defence is decision making. The best DotA 2 players are able to avoid disadvantageous fights by anticipating all the probable behaviours of their (human) opponents and using that to make good decisions about when and where to move.
