What's in a name?

There seems to be a flurry of post-agile activity on blogs right now. If you haven’t noticed, you can look at an example here. There is more elsewhere, and Jonathan Kohl tells me there is more coming. What this amounts to is a growing number of people who, for a variety of reasons, have a problem associating themself with the word “Agile”.

I still talk about “Agile”. I don’t make assumptions about what others mean when they say “Agile”. I ask. In conversation, I clarify what I mean when I use the word. I suspect this is a habit many testers pick up over time, due to the endless definitions applied to a small set of words in our field.

But I do see a problem with the name. If we look at the top of the agile manifesto, we see “We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it”. That doesn’t seem any different to what people trying to re-badge Agile propose, but I do see that Agile might not be the right word for “uncovering better ways of developing software”.

Perhaps it would be better to figure out what it should have been called in the first place. But how often is the name of a movement, phase or era bestowed by the movement itself? My limited knowledge of such things tells me that those who come later that get naming rights.

I can see why some still cling to the name. I can see why others seek a better name. The principles and values of “Agility” as defined in the manifesto are principles of a healthy working environment. The term Agile helped to distinguish a group of approaches from the dominant thinking of the day. Now that Agile approaches have entered the mainstream, the challenge is not necessarily to be more agile, even for Agile projects.

I’m not comfortable with the proposed alternative term ‘Pliant’. I think it creates a judgement in people’s mind, a tool for people to make divisions. Just as people may be derided for not being “Agile”, so might they be derided for not being ‘Pliant’. Perhaps the biggest problem with Agile (and Pliant) is that it’s not about a particular set of practices, or aspect of an organisation, but a word that threatens to encompass the whole organisation. Perhaps we should just get back to words like software development, systems thinking, management, testing…

I’m more comfortable with “Post-agilism”. It’s less confronting. It’s a reference to a time, not a relative property of a development approach. But if we accept that the purpose of the Agile manifesto was to encourage us to figure out better ways of developing software, the post-agile and Pliant thinkers are still doing exactly that. There is a parallel in that some people see post-modernism as simply “late modernism”. Maybe we are in “late agilism”. But history may decide that software development is simply progressing, and the Agile manifesto was just a kick in the pants in a period of stagnation.

“Agile” is not a problem. In some ways though, the name is. It’s a name that captures a reaction, not its more important goals of continual improving of the craft through practice. It served its purpose. It opened up discussion and suggested ways in which things might be different. It was a banner to rally under, for people presenting an alternate vision to the common practice of the day. It wasn’t an absolute, procedural description of how to achieve ‘Agility’. The manifesto is evidence of that. But many see the right hand side of the Agile values gaining dominance over the left.

It’s time to move on, and not get stuck in the process-driven ruts Agile was trying to get us out of. Maybe we can do it without a label this time, and look back on the words of the Agile manifesto as a reminder to keep looking for better ways.

If we can’t, we could do much worse than to label our ideas “post-agilism” or “late agilism”. It’s bound to be renamed by someone else one day anyway.