Semantic Journey of Agile

In the year 2006 Martin Fowler invented a new word “Semantic Diffusion”.  He described the new word as: 

Semantic diffusion occurs when you have a word that is coined a person or group, often with a pretty good definition, but then gets spread through the wider community in a way that weakens that definition. This weakening risks losing the definition entirely - and with it any usefulness to the term.

 In one of his articles, he argued that the term “Agile” is a victim of Semantic Diffusion  (https://martinfowler.com/bliki/SemanticDiffusion.html).

Let’s try to understand at what stage of semantic life, is the term  Agile now.

In 2001, a new word was coined– “Agile”.  It was confined to the values and principles espoused in the Agile manifesto of software development.

By the year 2006, the term “Agile” was reaching far beyond the traditional software development space, with the human aspect of the software getting more weightage. Also, Agile started to get traction in the maintenance work. 

This picture clearly depicts the signs of Semantic Diffusion.

In the year 2019, Agile has become popular in Marketing & Sales, Budgeting, Human Resource Management, touching almost every aspect of organizational life. 

 

I am sure this image clearly points toward overloading.

What next? Does the term “Agile” has Rock Star syndrome – live fast, die young? Or, something else is happening. 

In my view Agile is moving toward the “Semantic Expansion”; you can blame me for neologism.  Semantic expansion occurs when overloading leads to fragmentation of word via various suffixes and prefixes to define similar situations as espoused in the original meaning of the word, in various contexts.

For example Agile HR, Agile Marketing, Agile Project Manager, Agile Organization, Agile Project Manager, Agile Budgeting, Agile Team, etc.

 

On similar lines, DevOps lineage can be traced with DevSecOps, NoOps, DevOps Engineer, etc.