pliantalliance.org

Andrew has an interesting post on what we should call the traditional heavy weight waterfall processes. He comes up with “stubborn” as his adjective of choice, which I agree is a good word. But in his descripton of Agile, he contradicts himself.

In the first paragraph:

Agile is the most disciplined software development process I have used to date.

I was actually surprised at this statement and agree wholeheartedly. Agile is very disciplined. So disciplined in some cases that you get in trouble for daring to break the rules. For the record I’m going with the first entry in this definition of discipline, namely training to act in accordance with rules; drill: military discipline..

Then Andrew’s last paragraph reads like this:

I have found the adaptability of Agile and the disciplines of XP (test driven design, continuous integration, relentless refactoring, early and often delivery of working code) to be a much more satisfying solution for effective software development. And so have my customers.

So which is it? Is Agile disciplined or adaptable? To my mind, these two terms are contradictory. Maybe he ment you can be disciplined in your adaptability with Agile, but it is unclear. In any case, this kind of ambiguity is my main problem with Agile. Who the heck knows what it means anymore? There are so many definitions and so many people claiming to be Agile, that, like I’ve said before, the term is starting to get ambiguous at best, and meaningless at worst. If people just focused on “being agile” instead of “doing Agile” we’d have a lot less confusion.