No, its not. Its a management buzzword now. It started as a philosophy, and where it still is, the substance of its principles remains important. But, increasingly, its become a meaningless phrase that marketeers that neither understand nor care about technology slap on snake oil to sell it to managers that are out of the day-to-day process of technology.

To expand on this a little -- members of larger organizations have succeeded in neutralizing a threat to their perceived interests by making the language mean less than it used to. Effective agile practice breaks down a barrier between people making decisions and people doing the work. That must feel like a threat if your position involves little more than politely instructing other people what to do.

I think that looking at it as threat neutralization is badly misleading. I don't think management saw agile as a threat and neutralized, I think (1) management saw it as something that was producing value that they wanted to harness and implement, but generally failed to understand, and (2) people selling to management recognized this demand, and slapped the valuable label on whatever they could package. No threat, all opportunity. But same net effect.

> Effective agile practice breaks down a barrier between people making decisions and people doing the work. That must feel like a threat if your position involves little more than politely instructing other people what to do.

Honestly, I think that that the subset of management that understands agile well enough that they could feel threatened by it if they couldn't find a way to profit from it is the same subset that understands how to let it happen and own the results. The one that would be threatened by it if they could understand it well enough don't.

I like having a rate limiter between me and the people who keep changing their minds about what I should be doing. I like being able to outsource the job of talking sense into those people.

Yes indeed. There have been many times when I've been explicitly forbidden to talk to actual users in big companies.

At one place where I worked there were 4-5 big teams with different technology specializations and for every big project we did, these 4 teams had to have a cut of the project for budgeting purposes.

So no matter if there was a need for it or not, youd have BizTalk, or SAP, or SalesForce or whatever inject themselves into a solution and create a complete mess from an architecture standpoint. Completely idiotic.