Comment by doctor_eval

I completely agree with you about C&B. Even at the time, it felt to me mostly like a restatement of the zeitgeist. But Raymond was very influential at the time and was apparently one of the reasons Netscape released Mozilla as free software.

I also agree that “release early and often”, in particular, was a significant contribution, if not for originality then for reach. Not everyone was exposed to XP at the time, but ESR seemed to be everywhere. And for my part, the main take away from XP had been around pair programming which as a startup myself, I wasn’t into/couldn’t afford/didn’t subscribe to anyway.

But I do feel your comments about XP and agile miss the mark a tiny bit. XP was developed by Kent Beck - who went on to be one of the authors of the Agile Manifesto. Perhaps because of this, XP is considered an agile practice.

But agile is really just a set of values and principles. There are many practices that people claim as “agile”, many of which do not meet the criteria of the agile manifesto (I’m looking at you, SAFe).

I think in some ways, C&B was a precursor to the Agile Manifesto, which itself it arguably just a restatement of principles and practices that already existed.

(My limited personal experience with engineering in large traditional companies is that the manifesto is ignored, commercial practices and consultants who slap “agile” stickers on their traditional SDLCs still rule - and it is still, largely, the dark ages. I was heavily criticised for using a CD strategy for some enterprise software at the same brand name company that required me to enforce password rotation… in 2018).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_programming

https://agilemanifesto.org/