The XP folks crystallized what a lot of people were doing (in ad-hoc ways) and documented it so others could reuse the learnings more easily. [There's more to i

The XP folks crystallized what a lot of people were doing (in ad-hoc ways) and documented it so others could reuse the learnings more easily. [There's more to it than that, but that's the core of it] I think that's in-line with what you described above. I also think it captured what a lot of folks were trying to do at the time: shorten feedback cycles with RAD, etc. Scrum - or whatever it is that we see in the wild that's called Scrum - is exactly how you (and the article) describe. The way I see it, the corporate types were scared of the devs actually being self-managing/self-optimizing teams, and decided to turn to an Agile-Lite that they could sell as being new and shiney, but it's still the same command-and-control distrustful crap under the hood. (Non-Scrum) Agile did a great job at the lower layers (devs, facilitators), but nothing can change that much if you don't affect the management and exec levels.