Agile software development and homotopy

One of the things I learned from my tenure as a software project manager was that a project is more likely to succeed if there's a way to get where you want to go continuously. You want to move a project from A to B gradually, keeping a working code base all along the way. At the end of each day, the software may not be fully functional, but it should at least build. Anything that requires a big bang change, tearing the system apart for several days and putting it back together, is less likely to succeed.

This is very much like the idea of homotopy from topology, a continuous deformation of one thing into another. No discontinuities along the way - no ripping, no jumping suddenly from one thing to another.