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They may have done a better job instituting these practices across a large organization, and some of their tools have very useful and novel features, but I very much doubt there is a single practice that they actually invented. If you think there is one, please be specific. I think what Google contributed is evidence that these practices can be instituted at scale, which really was sorely lacking in some cases. This helped the industry disseminate them.

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Of course it's hard to say if they completely, 100% invented anything from scratch. But they sure did "pioneer" a lot of unique practices that other software companies were not following at the time.

A specific example - the practice of keeping the entire codebase at the company under a single "source" repo. Pre-Google - it would've been considered outrageous to have the entire codebase of a sophisticated software company keep their entire software contents under a single repo. But Google did it, and other companies have followed suit successfully (as Google DNA has leaked to other companies).

Yes, of course keeping code in a single repo is not a "new invention". Linux is a single repo; many smaller companies have only a single repo because their only product is a single web app. Google keeps nearly 100% of their entire codebase in a single repo - and that was definitely a novel approach at the time.

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