Agile is a service-management approach that rests on 4 pillars, themselves supported by 12 guiding principles. Unlike Scrum, for instance, it’s not a framework, and it doesn’t come with hard-and-fast requirements. That can be a good thing—no one wants to be burdened by some restrictive set of rules that ignore what they’re trying to get done. But the absence of hard-and-fast rules has also led to a proliferation of ‘flavors’ of Agile, some of which start to feel as though they’re Agile in name only (AINO).
Now, it’s not that the principles are outdated, or that they were never any use in the first place: it’s rather that practitioners, but especially their managers, have been too agile in their interpretation of Agile. The idea has somehow arisen that Agile is so flexible as a method that it can accommodate the imposition of a lot of new rules (or even “Laws”).
--Jim Highsmith