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Incrementalists-and-Completionists

4 min readStatus:Seedling

Lopp’s Incrementalist/Completionist dichotomy identifies two distinct personality orientations toward progress and completion that coexist — and frequently conflict — in software teams.

Incrementalists

  • Core orientation: Satisficer (Simon’s bounded rationality framework) — sets a “good enough to ship” threshold and stops when it is met
  • Strengths: Speed, momentum, pragmatism; intimately aware of organisational constraints and political realities; keeps teams shipping
  • Failure modes: Accumulates technical debt by treating shortcuts as permanent; builds local optima that resist later structural improvement
  • Mantra: “Ship it. We’ll fix it later.”

Completionists

  • Core orientation: Maximizer (Schwartz’s framework) — cannot commit until the solution approaches its theoretically optimal form
  • Strengths: Long-range vision; sees not just the immediate solution but the two-year and five-year solution; prevents structural debt from compounding
  • Failure modes: Delivery failure and paralysis; scope expands to accommodate the perfect solution; the ideal becomes the enemy of the shipped
  • Mantra: “If we’re solving this, solve it right.”

Why Both Are Necessary

A healthy team requires both types. The tension between them is productive when managed:

  • Incrementalists prevent analysis paralysis and keep delivery velocity alive
  • Completionists prevent the codebase from becoming unmaintainable — which ultimately stops Incrementalists from shipping at all
  • The argument between them, conducted at the level of specific decisions rather than ideology, is the argument a team should want to have

The Dysfunction: One Type Managing the Other

The pathological case is when one type manages the other without awareness of the difference:

  • Completionist managing Incrementalists: Reviews become exhaustive quality gates; the team experiences endless redesign cycles; pragmatic judgment is not trusted
  • Incrementalist managing Completionists: Technical concerns are dismissed as perfectionism; structural debt accumulates invisibly; Completionists feel they are building disposable systems

Managing the Mix

  • Make the type difference explicit within the team — name it without stigma
  • Separate design discussions (Completionist-led) from delivery discussions (Incrementalist-led)
  • Create formal processes for “ship this now AND schedule the structural fix” — this resolves the conflict rather than suppressing it
  • Know your own type as a manager and compensate for its blind spots
  • For Completionists: define “done” explicitly upfront and use time-boxing as a forcing function
  • For Incrementalists: establish visible debt-tracking so incremental decisions are schedulable for payback

Sources

  • Lopp, Michael. (2019). Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager. 3rd ed. Apress. ISBN: 978-1-484-23712-4. Chapter 39: “Incrementalists and Completionists.” Available: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4842-3713-1

    • Primary source; contains definitions, character sketches, and management guidance for both types

  • Lopp, Michael (Rands). (n.d.). “Incrementalists & Completionists.” Rands In Repose (blog). Available: https://randsinrepose.com/archives/incrementalists-completionists/

    • Original blog post from which the book chapter derives; freely accessible

  • Simon, Herbert A. (1955). “A Behavioral Model of Rational Choice.” Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 69, No. 1, pp. 99–118.

    • First formal articulation of satisficing; the Incrementalist maps directly onto Simon’s satisficing agent who stops search at the aspiration-level threshold

  • Schwartz, Barry, Andrew Ward, John Monterosso, Sonja Lyubomirsky, Katherine White, and Darrin R. Lehman. (2002). “Maximizing versus Satisficing: Happiness Is a Matter of Choice.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 83, No. 5, pp. 1178–1197. PubMed ID: 12416921. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.83.5.1178

    • Seminal empirical paper introducing the maximizer/satisficer distinction; Completionist behaviour maps onto the maximizer orientation

  • Harari, Dana, Brian W. Swider, Laurens Bujold Steed, and Amy P. Breidenthal. (2018). “Is Perfect Good? A Meta-Analysis of Perfectionism in the Workplace.” Journal of Applied Psychology, Vol. 103, No. 10, pp. 1121–1144. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000324

    • Meta-analysis (N = 25,212): perfectionistic concerns (fear of mistakes) predict burnout but not improved performance; strongly relevant to the Completionist failure mode

  • Cunningham, Ward. (1992). “The WyCash Portfolio Management System.” In OOPSLA ‘92: Addendum to the Proceedings. ACM Press. Summarised at: https://martinfowler.com/bliki/TechnicalDebt.html

    • Original coinage of the “technical debt” metaphor; the primary mechanism by which unchecked Incrementalism imposes costs on future delivery

Note

This content was drafted with assistance from AI tools for research, organization, and initial content generation. All final content has been reviewed, fact-checked, and edited by the author to ensure accuracy and alignment with the author’s intentions and perspective.

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