I have never argued that "no-one" encountered those ideas, and your repeated exaggeration of my position is frustrating.
Nobody in the Agile movement claimed novelty for individual pieces. What was different was the way the pieces went together, and the shift in values and cultural norms that they required. That wasn't purely novel either; the fact that several people invented similar processes at the same time suggests that, as with most inventions, change was in the air. But what the Agile people undeniably did was to define and promote that difference in a way that gave people something to rally around. At the time, waterfall and a waterfall-ish RUP were the big processes people were discussing, and the notion that one would focus on people over process, or working code over documentation was heretical.
Also, I'm having a hard time taking your approach to evidence seriously. Rapid Development was a major survey of current software project management and a catalog of best practices put out by a large tech publisher. Splosky was also writing clearly about current practices. Your counter-evidence is the (unnamed) projects you've (anonymously) been on. Plus that one of them wrote a different book that you can pick nits on.
And honestly, I don't get why you're arguing the nits and ignoring my main points. You clearly have some big issue with your version of Agile and it's imagined history. But I honestly don't care what process you follow as long as it doesn't suck for you, so arguing it with me isn't really helping anybody.
I'm sorry you're feeling frustrated with this discussion. I'm afraid I just don't understand what your "main points" are supposed to be, if you think I'm only picking nits with the details.
I started this subthread with some fairly black-and-white statements about the relative timing of good practices being adopted, Agile taking off, and less proven practices entering the picture:
Since then, you have accused me, repeatedly, of being wrong about the history of Agile. Is your objection that early versions of a few Agile processes already existed, albeit in relative obscurity, before the Manifesto was written, but I talked about how 'concrete examples of "Agile" processes started to appear' after the Manifesto was written?
If so, I'll happily concede that point. I don't think it really matters whether you define Agile as starting from the evolution of the general approach/abstract philosophy (which had evidently started by the time of those initial processes) or the writing of the concrete Manifesto and popularisation of the Agile moniker. Nor do I think it really matters whether you define processes like XP and Scrum as appearing as "Agile" processes when they were popularised and given that label (around the time the Manifesto also became widely known) or from when the original processes that became what we now call XP and Scrum were first used anywhere. Any way you cut it, we're talking about the same groups of people, the same general period of time, and the same end results.
My main point is simply that many of the good practices that were adopted by those early Agile processes and are often considered to fall under the Agile umbrella today did not actually originate during that period of time or with the people who worked on those early processes and the Manifesto. However, many of the Agile practices I consider unproven did originate during that period of time and with those people.
While you may wish that no-one in the Agile community claims otherwise, unfortunately that is not always true. While I was researching my post with sources, I found a comment on Martin Fowler's personal web site claiming that Kent Beck coined the term "refactoring" in the mid-'90s, for example, and numerous comments from various posters on other forums suggesting that Fowler's book was the definitive original reference. I think it is important to debunk such claims and any attempt to paint Agile and Waterfall as some sort of dichotomy. That just isn't how software development works, and being "Not Waterfall" is not an argument for switching to any given Agile process.
> I found a comment on Martin Fowler's personal web site claiming that Kent Beck coined the term "refactoring" in the mid-'90s, for example
No, I didn't. Sorry. I had read something similar in several other places, and when I did a search (since Fowler's site itself was blacked out) the resulting excerpt was truncated in a critical place that made it look like the above was true. Still, there are plenty of people who have claimed that the Agile movement originated ideas like refactoring in on-line forums and the like, so aside from setting the record straight regarding Fowler's site, my original point stands.
Nobody in the Agile movement claimed novelty for individual pieces. What was different was the way the pieces went together, and the shift in values and cultural norms that they required. That wasn't purely novel either; the fact that several people invented similar processes at the same time suggests that, as with most inventions, change was in the air. But what the Agile people undeniably did was to define and promote that difference in a way that gave people something to rally around. At the time, waterfall and a waterfall-ish RUP were the big processes people were discussing, and the notion that one would focus on people over process, or working code over documentation was heretical.
Also, I'm having a hard time taking your approach to evidence seriously. Rapid Development was a major survey of current software project management and a catalog of best practices put out by a large tech publisher. Splosky was also writing clearly about current practices. Your counter-evidence is the (unnamed) projects you've (anonymously) been on. Plus that one of them wrote a different book that you can pick nits on.
And honestly, I don't get why you're arguing the nits and ignoring my main points. You clearly have some big issue with your version of Agile and it's imagined history. But I honestly don't care what process you follow as long as it doesn't suck for you, so arguing it with me isn't really helping anybody.