Comment by hn_throwaway_99
2 years ago
> a closed-source commercial software development methodology that predates this article by about 4 years, and was au courant at the time Raymond was was writing.
I think you are misremembering. Check out the Wikipedia article on Extreme Programming [1] - The book Extreme Programming Explained wasn't published until 1999. Kent Back didn't even start working on the idea until 1996.
In any case, I'm not arguing that the idea of "release early and release often" was complete unheard of, but I am arguing that it was definitely not the standard and I would say the idea had more detractors than adherents at that time. There was still very much a battle between "waterfall processes" and "agile processes" that was really just starting to get going in the late 90s.