If your complaint is that smart people were already doing those things, but that better way had no name, or industry leadership, just word-of-mouth and vibes --

If your complaint is that smart people were already doing those things, but that better way had no name, or industry leadership, just word-of-mouth and vibes -- I agree? That's kinda why the whole manifesto came about. It was people collecting a bunch of successful practices and branding it so they could more effectively evangelize them. That's what manifestos are. But like all revolutions, sometimes you win and need to declare victory and go home. Delivery agility won. The remaining "Agile Industry" is mostly cancer. To be clear - I'm asserting that the Joel test was part of the broader delivery agility current in the industry. This current sprang from the lessons of the first web boom, and the fantastic changes in delivery possible on the web. In the shrink-wrap floppy world, yearly releases left so much time to just wander around and get lost. Head would spend weeks not compiling, and savvy devs knew the right times to merge head into their long-lived feature branches. Joel was explicitly reacting against that, and to SEMA, RUP, and the 90s planning driven movement where sub-module teams would write against fixed apis that hadn't been implemented yet. Maybe I'm exaggerating. I agree that he differed sharply from the XP and other agile folks in some ways, and would never have signed the manifesto. But who was Joel talking to when he wrote: "Another great thing about keeping the bug count at zero is that you can respond much faster to competition. Some programmers think of this as keeping the product ready to ship at all times. Then if your competitor introduces a killer new feature that is stealing your customers, you can implement just that feature and ship on the spot, without having to fix a large number of accumulated bugs." Or Joel again: "The other crucial thing about having a schedule is that it forces you to decide what features you are going to do, and then it forces you to pick the least important features and cut them rather than slipping into featuritis (a.k.a. scope creep)." You can argue that people were already doing these things, but clearly Joel thought there was an audience that wasn't (including early 90s Microsoft!). Compare that to the manifesto: "Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer's competitive advantage." Anyway: Single-backlog. Ship at any time with a single click. High quality. Clear comms. Dev focus. Blah blah. It's not Scrum, but I'd definitely call that agile as we understood it in 2001. If you think that's just good practice, and has nothing to do with "agile", I'm happy to retire the word. Time to move on.