James A. Highsmith III

Adapative Software Development is about an agile development process that scales up to larger, more distributed projects. Highsmith concentrates on principles and not prescriptive processes (i.e. better quality communication, not collocation) and asks the audience to believe that there's nothing size-specific about the principles. This sounds plausible to me, although like most philosophies, you've got to try it out to believe it.

The climbing analogy got to me after a while. Highsmith had to explain the intricacies of technical climbing, often spending more page space on climbing than on software development. If you have to explain your analogy, is it really that effective?

The last chapter on project management seemed very wise to me, but I've not seen a lot of examples of wise project management in real life, so perhaps I'm easily impressed.… (más)