Has Agile jumped the shark? (blogs.msdn.com)

I was at the MagicRuby conference when Dave Thomas said, "Agile is not a noun."

And he's absolutely right. Unfortunately, the article gets this wrong and uses Agile as a noun in every paragraph.

If 'Agile jumped the shark' it's because people insist on making it a thing, instead of a mindset, not because the capitalists found a new toy.

I disdain articles that begin by explaining their own "clever" headlines. Like anybody would try to read it on the internet if they didn't know what Jump the shark means.

I don't think this is a new problem - people were discussing this in the early days of c2.com when Agile was still called eXtreme Programming. Let's face it, puritanism is useless in a corporate environment where normal distribution of intelligence and inertia rules.

Agile development practices are at the point of their adoption cycles where the hype has died down, and the chaff has been thrown out. Organizations of all sizes have adopted agile practices, from small startups, to global megacorps, with varying levels of success.

Agile development isn't a sexy, novel new thing these days. That doesn't mean it's "jumped the shark", it means it's a fairly mature and understood practice.