Wild West to Agile: Adventures in Software Development Evolution and Revolution

1

The Adventure Begins

HIGH ON THE north ridge of Mt. Jefferson in the Oregon Cascades, near the top of a 25-foot ice chute—a left cramponed foot with two small front-points in the ice, an ice ax with its pick buried a quarter-inch deep in the ice over my head, right foot scrabbling for purchase on a rock nubbin, and my rear extremity hanging 800 feet above the Jefferson Park glacier—I asked myself, “Did I pick the wrong mountain to climb?”¹

1. A version of this story opened my first book, Adaptive Software Development (Highsmith, 2000).

The previous day, in July 1987, my two climbing partners and I drove three hours from Portland to the trailhead, ...