[ska]

In my experience "agile" was a loose rebranding of ideas that had been around for a long while (see all the other non-waterfall approaches that predate it) and "Agile" (i.e. the manifesto) was just one attempt at one of these sort of methodologies.

Once it got popular, "Agile" was co-opted by all the usual players (cf "extreme" before it, to a lesser degree).

The important idea is "agile" vs. waterfall, whether or not that includes anything directly recognizable as "Agile". Or call it something else, doesn't really matter.

Recent history shows you can certainly do things directly recognizable as part of the Agile methodology while demonstrably not being agile, so modulo the no true scotsman fallacy it's a much less fruitful distinction to draw.

[dennis_jeeves]

>In my experience "agile" was a loose rebranding of ideas that had been around for a long while (see all the other non-waterfall approaches that predate it) and "Agile" (i.e. the manifesto) was just one attempt at one of these sort of methodologies.

You are correct. The Agile term was probably marketed to the management types as a some breakthrough methodology to _finally_ control the budget for software development. Then it took a life of it's own as many things do.

[tremoloqui]

Most good ideas predate their branding.

[ska]

True, but they were already branded albeit not as successfully. And this is very much one of those things that is somewhat evergreen - it just gets a new branding every decade or so.

I guess I'm saying "Agile" was/is one of several, and that's ok (good even). It's worth not getting bogged down on the "Agile" part and focusing on the more essential things.