By 'agile', as one of the first people around the manifesto, Fowler means product development applied to software. If you're curious which fields benefit from i

By 'agile', as one of the first people around the manifesto, Fowler means product development applied to software. If you're curious which fields benefit from it and which don't, it is all fields in which you create a product that users use or will use. Agile (product development) doesn't help any process which is not supposed to be used by users. Examples: software products with 100%, and no less, defined specs. Second use case is never released vaporware, such as everything for which waterfall methodology is used and specs are assumed to be 100% correct upfront and it turns out they are not. The only type of project with 100% defined requirements I'm aware of are one-to-one software rewrites. Agile for majority of devs and consultants (and not for the people around manifesto, such as Fowler) is conflated with a 2 week or so status reporting and planning process. It has nothing to do with product development as these status reports typically don't ask 'what is the status of the product' but the status report is typically about 'what everybody is doing and if they are busy'. This has nothing to do with the original agile manifesto and if you read through it you'll notice that this modern 'Agile/Scrum' time-boxed busywork and status report is in contradiction with its principles. Keeping devs busy is obviously the goal of this consulting scrum as that is what consultants charge for. Fowler himself gave up years ago explaining the difference. When words become popular, their meaning gets hijacked and repurposed. He explained this in a blog post of his https://martinfowler.com/bliki/SemanticDiffusion.html https://martinfowler.com/bliki/SemanticDiffusion.html