We say an organization is “agile” when it responds to threat and opportunity in ways uniquely of the moment. An agile organization is informed by history but not shackled to practice encoded in software not likely to be revised soon.
A double handful of thinkers, myself included, chose the term “agile” to describe the fresh emphasis we had all observed given to software that remained immediately adaptable to changing needs. Such forces are felt most strongly in new software development but do not disappear in any way for software so important that it should be kept alive and healthy for a lifetime.
The thinkers took issue with management practices such as “fortune telling,” wherein software developers were asked to make predictions about ...