“Agile” is Just A Brand Name
Brian Marick, a well-known “Agile tester” and signer of the Agile Manifesto, has confirmed what I had feared all along, except it is worse than I thought. Not only is “Agile” just a marketing term, “It was explicitly conceived of as a marketing term: to be evocative, to be less dismissable than “lightweight” (the previous common term).”
I thought it was some money grubbing marketers and book sellers who hijacked the term that the Agile Alliance so smartly chose, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. It appears we were being duped all along and that’s really disappointing.
Oh well. Brian’s post essentially ends a large debate that pliantalliance.org has been having (mostly with itself) about whether “Agile” was to be taken literally or not. This is actually a good thing. Now we can get on with the business of pointing out this difference to people and promoting the alternative of critically evaluating one’s own context and changing processes/techniques where appropriate as a means of improving how software development is done.
For the record, the “pliant” in “pliant software development” is not a marketing term and is ment to literally mean doing software in a pliant way.