“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.
on June 20th, 2006 at 7:56 am
[...] Dan North has a post about how agility is about coming up with a “repeatable, predictable way to adapt to change”. First of all, as we’ve discovered, “Agility” is about marketing, so in a sense, Dan is wrong. However, getting better at software development is about evolvibilty. Adapting to a changing context and working in a way that best suits ythat context is the path to better software development. [...]
on June 30th, 2006 at 1:46 pm
James disputes Brian’s claim that “Agile” is a marketing term. I can see this becoming a long drawn out argument. Frankly I don’t really care about the origins of “Agile”. All I care about is what it means now. In my opinion, “Agile” has definately become a marketing term. So, like I said in the original post, I’m moving on.