Agile

The surviving contribution is a set of adaptive engineering mechanisms, not iteration alone and not mandatory Scrum ceremony.

Genealogy

Iterative/incremental development, test-first work, evolutionary delivery, prototyping, and risk-driven spiral predate the 2001 Manifesto.
Scrum, XP, DSDM, Crystal, FDD, ASD, and neighbouring methods formed a plural field. Scrum supplied empirical management; XP supplied a more explicit technical changeability system.
The Manifesto and principles formed a thin declaration rather than a complete lifecycle or causal study.
Lean software, software Kanban, Continuous Delivery, and DevOps hybridised with or reacted to Agile practice.
SRE, safety, security, product discovery, evolutionary architecture, platform engineering, and systems assurance also converged from partly independent traditions.

Beyond the word iteration

Agile's strongest surviving properties include integrated working evidence, early risk retirement, automated regression, frequent real integration, technical changeability, release-ready state with exposure decoupled, direct problem/environment feedback, authorised process adaptation, sustainable pace and sustainable recovery capacity, and operational feedback after delivery.

A calendar iteration without engineering evidence, adaptation authority, technical quality, or operational learning does not establish those properties.

Selected sources and claim limits

Source	Supports	Does not establish
Larman and Basili, Iterative and Incremental Development: A Brief History	Representative pre-2001 IID, test-first, and evolutionary-delivery history.	An exhaustive genealogy or causal comparison.
Boehm, A Spiral Model of Software Development and Enhancement	Risk-driven iteration distinct from arbitrary fixed cadence.	The later Agile package.
The Agile Manifesto and principles	The signatories' comparative values and twelve principles.	A lifecycle, complete method, or outcome proof; the right-hand items retain value.
Schwaber and Sutherland, Scrum Guide 2020	Scrum is purposefully incomplete; inspection requires adaptation; increments must be usable.	Mandatory story points, velocity, two-week sprints, or a complete technical system.
Fowler, Continuous Integration	Frequent real mainline integration, automation, and immediate repair.	Causal-trial evidence or proof from owning a CI server.
Dybå and Dingsøyr, systematic review	Promising but methodologically weak early whole-method evidence.	Current or universal causal superiority.
Serrador and Pinto, 1,002-project analysis	Positive associations with efficiency and stakeholder satisfaction.	Causality; reported Agile use was observational.
Soares et al., CI systematic review	A 101-study population containing benefits and costs.	One homogeneous CI definition or effect.

Rejected caricatures and ceremonies

Agile is not Scrum, and Scrum is not a complete engineering system. Shorter feedback, a two-week sprint, fixed iteration, release trains, continuous deployment, daily status meetings, user-story syntax, story points, velocity, TDD sequence, pair programming, one Product Owner, or a scaling framework are not universal prescriptions.

The retained property must be tested directly: coordination rather than stand-up attendance; learning rather than retrospective occurrence; regression evidence rather than a TDD label; knowledge resilience rather than pair count; and outcome evidence rather than velocity.

Native route

IMPLEMENTAUDIT uses adaptive planning, integrated evidence, phase-by-phase execution, explicit stopping, and feedback loops as native controls. The Evolved-LAW synthesis explains which controls pre-existed and which proportionality distinctions were sharpened. It adds no sprint, backlog, Scrum, XP, SAFe, or Agile runtime mode.