Describe Agile in One Word

This morning I fell into a discussion on LinkedIn where the question was posed, “if you had to describe Agile vs. Waterfall in one word, how would you describe it?”

Obviously that one word would be “iterative” but strangely enough that was not suggested by any of the 24 or so responders.

Surveying people at the office I broadened the question to eliminate the comparison with Waterfall, thus I asked “if you had to describe Agile in one word, what word?”

The #1 answer in our office was, unsurprisingly, “agile”. Most people saw the term “agile” as adequately self-describing. When asked to produce another word most people started pouring out terms like:

Mindset?

The folks in our office never came up with “mindset” as a term, however, on the LinkedIn discussion the term that won the most votes was “mindset”. Huh?? Yes, you read that right! “Mindset” was the #1 term for describing Agile.

Oddly, I think a lot of people see Agile as representing a radically different mindset. Those people think the mindset is what differentiates Agile, i.e. the strong center.

I do not count myself among those people.

Caution – we’ve been here before!!!

Way back in the 90’s Object-Oriented Software Development was the hot thing and people made the mistake of differentiating O-O from functional by "object thinking". It was said that Object-Orientation required a distinctive way of thinking, a new way of thinking that was decidedly not functional. Sound familiar?  If you wanted to be in the cool kids club you had to “think objects” otherwise we’d label you a dinosaur.  Sorry!

Of course, the good stuff from O-O, the stuff that survives to this day, had nothing to do with “object thinking” or “mindset”. The object thinkers were, as a group, misled and the real timeless benefits of the paradigm escaped them.  Nobody in 2012 goes out of their way to “think in objects” despite the fact that O-O is alive and well at a programming level.

What is Agile’s strong center?

Agile := agile
Agile can be nimble and flexible but imputes different strong centers depending on the direction you approach it from. Scrum (a contributor to Agile) has its own strong center that is different than Kanban (another contributor), which is different from TDD.  Any custom blend of these will introduce a unique strong center.

Scrum := egalitarianism
In Scrum, "egalitarianism" is a central characteristic that differentiates it from other iterative/incremental models (e.g., RUP, Spiral, etc.).  Scrum is essentially a classic iterative/incremental development approach in the tradition of Boehm’s Spiral methodology but with an egalitarian ethos.

Kanban := continuous
Kanban's central differentiating characteristic is being "continuous", as-in a continuous flow of work.

TDD := TD
The strong center of Test Driven Development is self-evident in its name.

Even with Agile being 90% mainstream in 2012, it is clear that the vast majority of people exposed to Agile have no idea what it really is. I think the blame goes to the consulting and training industry because they are are failing to educate.

PS:  Doesn’t that dog on the cover art look seriously happy?