Interesting. And Amusing. Lots of people screaming something like "Agile will never work, it's about getting out of the door regardless of quality", others claiming it's this wonderful "new" system, and maybe a few (only a few) looking at what really matters. And I don't think Steve ever metioned "Agile".

Well, I think I was using "Agile" at the end of 1975, when of course it was called "common sense", not"Agile". I had been persuaded to take over and rescue a project that had been repearedly failing to deliver for a couple of years (and had destroyed the careers of five or six project managers). I sorted the short term commitments using just ordinary management, not even common sense - just beating up accountants to get the team paid for overtime and shift allowances, and taking on the bug report backlog myself so the team didn't have to look at it (that was the "gain trust" step that's essential when taking over a demoralised team, fortunately I could discover all the bugs despite never having worked with the hardware or the programming language before). But the medium term (about 5 months) commitments were a bit more difficult - they obviously couldn't be achieved. So I talked to the people who had imposed these commitments; hardly any were real customer requirements in the committed timescale, so I simply infomed senior management that we would be achieving only some of them (specifying what was and wasn't going to be achieved) and left them to howl at each-other - that's what I understand the "Agile" approach to be (of course if management supports "Agile", there's no howling). That left me enough resource to add a vast reliability improvement (50-fold reduction in frequency of OS crashes cause by my teams OS components) to the medium term delivery. And that's the point of "Agile" - you don't implement pointless junk, and you use the saved resource to improve reliability/general quality. But I don't like calling it "Agile" because I learnt this approach to development and release in the early 70s, decades before some peope decided to call it "Agile", pretend it was new, and claim credit for something they'd contributed nothing but a new buzzword to.