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Comment by tremoloqui | Hacker News Reader

The terms "agile" and "Agile" have two separate meanings.

Big 'A' - "Agile" is waterfall re-branded - an excuse for corporate empire building and business as usual. It involves lot's of meetings and not trusting those who build software to do the right thing.

Small 'a' - "agile" is the implementation of the manifesto, which basically comes down to smart people figuring out how to work together towards a goal, often by taking small steps.

Until the terminology is sorted out the discussion can't help but be confused.

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Since businesses are the ones who employ software developers, 'Agile' is the only Agile that matters because that's the definition the people who pay money use.

We can talk all day about principle philosophical differences and what is/isn't 'agile,' but there has been a consensus from businesses in industry that 'agile' is 'Agile.'

Agile has become an excuse for terrible planning and offloading more and more work with ever increasing responsibilities to developers. At some point, enough professionals will reject following these terrible frameworks through different mechanisms. We're definitely not there yet, unfortunately.

The solution imo is to remove those parts of the industry that are driving the mistaken consensus.

Build software in small firms or consultancies who will treat it as a craft.

Maybe more a hope than a solution.

Agree 100%: agile practices can be great.

Hiring a consultant to teach 'Agile' is easy: the change of practices from something completely top-down to something that empowers the people at the bottom is the hard part and some orgs aren't capable of changing. Too many orgs are built around micromanagement, they don't know any other way.

To these orgs it's a matter of trust and power.

In my experience "agile" was a loose rebranding of ideas that had been around for a long while (see all the other non-waterfall approaches that predate it) and "Agile" (i.e. the manifesto) was just one attempt at one of these sort of methodologies.

Once it got popular, "Agile" was co-opted by all the usual players (cf "extreme" before it, to a lesser degree).

The important idea is "agile" vs. waterfall, whether or not that includes anything directly recognizable as "Agile". Or call it something else, doesn't really matter.

Recent history shows you can certainly do things directly recognizable as part of the Agile methodology while demonstrably not being agile, so modulo the no true scotsman fallacy it's a much less fruitful distinction to draw.

Most good ideas predate their branding.

True, but they were already branded albeit not as successfully. And this is very much one of those things that is somewhat evergreen - it just gets a new branding every decade or so.

I guess I'm saying "Agile" was/is one of several, and that's ok (good even). It's worth not getting bogged down on the "Agile" part and focusing on the more essential things.

>In my experience "agile" was a loose rebranding of ideas that had been around for a long while (see all the other non-waterfall approaches that predate it) and "Agile" (i.e. the manifesto) was just one attempt at one of these sort of methodologies.

You are correct. The Agile term was probably marketed to the management types as a some breakthrough methodology to _finally_ control the budget for software development. Then it took a life of it's own as many things do.

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