Useful history (This will bring out the haters, but ). Agile working methods date back to the early '80s & are a natural evolution of TPS/Lean from the '70s, sans the manufacturing part. The first shop I worked in out of school was agile (autonomous teams, frequent releases, etc.), though we didn't call it that.

The Agile Manifesto came along in 2001. It was meant to be a snapshot of what a handful of practitioners had been doing for a decade or more—that's it. We've been learning over the past 20 years, but the underlying thinking is still solid. I've a more modern take at https://holub.com/heu.

Kent Beck's "Extreme Programming Explained" was published around the same time, and it was more influential than the Manifesto. However, the techniques were truly extreme in the CMMI corporate world of the time. Many smaller shops saw the goodness and jumped on XP, but the corporations shied away in horror, discounting it as nonsensical.

XP was the first Agile process that anybody had ever heard of. It dominated the landscape, and nobody paid any attention at all to Scrum during that period. Scrum was not practiced anywhere I knew of, at least.

Then the Scrum-industrial-complex PR machine kicked into gear with their certificates, and the corporations lapped it up. Scrum was initially marketed with "Most executives today are not happy with their organization's ability to deliver systems at reasonable cost and time frames." That quote is on the back cover of Schwaber and Beedle's Agile Software Development with Scrum [2002], the first book on Scrum that was widely read. The blurb also says, "Learn how to simplify XP implementation through a Scrum wrapper." XP was first by their own admission.

The certificate mills Scrum-was-first myth gives it legitimacy & an air of implied superiority, but that's complete BS. Scrum was just a handful of teams and academic papers for years after XP. When the OOPSLA paper was published in 1995, many of us had been working in "Agile' ways for a decade or more, and the paper inspired zero industry adoption. Same for Takeuchi and Nonaka's excellent "The New New Product Development Game" [1986, http://tinyurl.com/nxapmmx]. The Scrum described in that paper has little resemblance to Scrum as currently practiced.

The corporations drawn to certification snake oil are also deeply impacted by Larman's Law. They implemented Scrum as what they were already doing but with new names. E.g., there's no Project Manager role in Scrum, but you find it in virtually every corporate "Scrum" shop. This whitewashing transmogrified Scrum into the putrid steaming mass it is now. That, in turn, dragged Agile (which those corporations were always, and still are, inimical to) down with it.

So, the original Agile thinking and practices are still great ways to build software, but they've been buried under a heap of corporate excrement, too smelly for anybody to be interested in excavating to find the gold underneath. It's too bad, really.

Source: x.com/allenholub/status/1846275670483128563