This comment was posted on an earlier item entitled "Agile" considered harmful. I thought it was interesting enough to deserve a little more visibility than it would have as a comment, so I’m highlighting it in a separate post, along with my reply.
Tag: agile
Words don’t mean what they don’t mean
<rant>
Words don’t have firm, unambiguous, unchanging meanings. This is a source of some frustration for me. The same word can have multiple meanings. Sometimes there are context-dependent meanings. Sometimes there are shades of meaning conveyed by tone of voice. People can have multiple interpretations of the same basic meaning of any given word. Clear communication is more challenging than it might appear to be.
In the field of software development, we have an unfortunate habit of re-using old words to represent new concepts. Maybe it’s because we value re-use (whatever that means). The English word, agile already had a meaning before software developers came along and started using it for something else. A ballerina is agile. A faun is agile. That’s easy to understand. Now, software development can be agile, too (whatever that means).
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“Agile” considered harmful
At the time the term “agile software development” was coined, it filled a need. Different people had come up with different responses to the endemic problems in IT. Most of these innovations were ad hoc, localized, and not widely shared. A few had been published in book form and were better known than others. But there was no single flag around which people interested in improving the state of the art of software development could rally.
After the Snowbird meeting, we had such a flag. “Agile” was loosely enough defined, and yet clearly enough focused, to serve as a basis for people to innovate in the areas of process, practices, and human factors to achieve better results than were seen with traditional methods, as indicated by the many industry studies and surveys carried out in the 1990s and early 2000s. The loose definition of “agile” was, in the early years of the movement, its main strength. The very looseness of the definition enabled innovation. But every strength is also a weakness, when it is taken beyond the point of diminishing returns.
Now, more than ten years later, the word “agile” has suffered from the inherent downside of its loose definition. The word has been co-opted by every pundit, author, consultant, trainer, and coach in the IT field. For them, “agile” means “whatever we sell.” For people in IT organizations, the perception is that they had better embrace “agile” or they will be marginalized and their careers will stall. For them, “agile” means whatever it has to mean to qualify them to sit with the cool kids in the school lunchroom. They are more concerned with achieving a high score on the latest “agile” assessment than they are with software quality, consistent delivery, and sustainable performance. Form trumps substance.
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