135: Jim Highsmith

Transcript: Joe Krebs 0:10 Agile FM radio for the Agile community. www agile.fm. Thank you for tuning in to another episode of agile FM today. I have Jim Highsmith here. Jim Highsmith just released a book called Wild West to Agile the adventures in software development, evolution and revolution. And it came out by Pearson as a publisher. Well, before we get started taking the book apart, welcome to the podcast. Jim, I'm so happy you're here. Thanks. SoJim Highsmith 0:46 I'm glad to be Joe Krebs 0:47 A lot of people know, Jim for one of the 17 signatories of the Agile Manifesto. And so this is, this is a very interesting book you wrote, because it's about a time period of 60 years of software development, software engineering, but also management leadership topics, and you group them into four eras. And we'll talk a little bit about those, obviously, and discuss if that's if that's possible. But you did write a book in 1999, or something. And the book was called adaptive software development. And without that, without that book, our entire industry would have been possibly called adaptive instead of Agile.Jim Highsmith 1:36 Yeah, it's interesting, you know, before the Agile Manifesto meeting, Kent Beck and I swapped books, or manuscripts before they were published, I read XP, for it was published, and he read my adaptive book for it was published. And so we, we had those went into the Agile Manifesto meeting. And it was it was, is I remember, we had like, 20 words up on the board. And we whittled them down to agile, but adaptive was one of them until the board and I made the point that I didn't think that the name ought to be something that one of us already had.Joe Krebs 2:15 Yeah. And and then we you guys chose the word agile became the Agile Manifesto. And, you know, and that was just the starting point of the fourth out of your four areas you are highlighting in your book. There's three before that, right. And this is this is this is the, this is the interesting piece here is did you take journal, did you write journal for those last 60 years? Or how do you remember, going all the way back when I looked at your book is fascinating to see all of those topics? But by no way? Could I remember all of those things, how you wrote them down? How did you do that? Well,Jim Highsmith 2:54 it's interesting, because the things that I had to look at changed abruptly in the mid 90s, when I started having emails and computerized documents. And the other parts of it, particularly the early years, was basically from memory. It's interesting, as I, as I looked at things as I began to remember, other things came to me. So it was it was interesting how one memory led to another memory.Joe Krebs 3:26 Wow, that's amazing. Yeah. So even Nike made it into the book, right? Yeah. Nice. So what's interesting about this book is I looked at the title. And obviously, it's about a reflection on 60 years of software engineering, from Apollo to SpaceX, if you want to see that. Right. I think that was one of those subtitles. What's interesting is when I first picked it up, I thought it was a book about that wasn't sure let's put it this way, if it's about you, or is it about a historical book about all of what's going on? And then when I started reading it, I was like, Oh, my God, this is fascinating, I's both. It's, it's a reflection on the the eras ors of what was happening in the last six years of software engineering, plus a personal touch from you, and how everything came together. Why did you decide off of putting this together, like your personal experience? And, you know, what do you what do you think is benefiting from the historical aspect of the book?Jim Highsmith 4:32 Well, one of the things about the history that I think is important is that it helped by understanding some of the history, it helps us prepare for the future. I don't try to predict the future in the book. And I say this is, you know, part of being ready for the future is preparation. And it's interesting how this book got started, and why the personal is in there, because it actually started out as a family oriented memoir to my grandkids. And as I, as I developed that and tried to figure out how to make something that would be interesting to teenagers, because they're in their mid teens now, I decided on this kind of scope of 60 years and breaking it into arrows. And once I did that, I realized that a lot of it was my personal stories. And I kept, I kept asking people, which do I emphasize? Do I emphasize historic history? Or do I emphasize the personal and people like Martin Fowler, who was a reader of the manuscript and had a lot of great information and feedback for me? Yeah, pushing me to do more personal or like a memoir. So it is kind of a historical memoir. And I think that it also helped me reduce the scope of the book. As I tell people, it's not the history of software development, it's a history of software development, it's really important, ...