Ok, *this* is what we’ve been talking about here for the last three years. I’m assuming the author has never heard of pliantalliance.org, but despite that, it appears he’s been very pliant in his development environment, which happens to be a ‘distributed agile’ team. He and his team looked at Scrum. They looked at XP. They looked at the Agile Manifesto. And they proceeded to be agile with Agile. The team ended up keeping stuff from XP, dumping a lot of the Scrum ‘rules’ and evolving their definition of “Agile” over time into something that works for them.
For the record, I don’t personally agree with everything they have decided on doing. For example, I’m still a big holdout on universal pair-programming. But my opinion doesn’t really matter. I’m not on their team. I really agree with some other things they are doing, like really emphasizing communication and knowledge transfer. But again, my agreement doesn’t really matter either. The point is, they’ve taken what the books said, spun in their own experience, mixed in their own current environment and voila…successful software development. It isn’t that hard.