Jim Coplien On “The Hijacking Of The Word Agile”
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about The Hijacking Of The Word Agile. In that post I’ve mentioned Jim Coplien’s book Organizational Patterns of Agile Software Development.
And today, a new comment was added to this post by… Jim Coplien. Due to the illusive nature of the Web I can’t know the author’s identity for sure, but since it is extremely flattering to be reviewed by Jim Coplien, I try to convince myself that it’s authentic.
Anyway, the comment itself is very interesting, so I invite you to read it.
If Agile leaders are starting to think of Agile as adaptive, that’s great. By the way, this is exactly what I argued in my FlexDev post: we should adapt the process and the concrete practices to each context. My criticism in the Hijacking post was of people’s use of the word Agile as a cover-up for a mess, and not on the nature of the real Agile practices.
The text from Jim Coplien’s book was quoted merely to show how the word agile can be used for marketing. I know that this wasn’t really the intention of the authors. I believe, however, that in these couple of lines they captured the essence of the marketing trend revolving around the term Agile. A simple search for books with the word Agile in their title at Amazon can demonstrate the point.
I think the most important message is this: use your head and don’t sanctify anything anyone says. Or in Jim Coplien’s words:
“I try to use the [term adaptive] more and more these days. Because it hasn’t (yet) attained buzzword status it helps encourage people to stop and think rather than to jump to conclusions.”
