Keynote speech
Cooperative Games of Invention and Communication
Alistair Cockburn (Humans and Technology)
Our attempts to understand software development by comparing it to other activities
(using analogies from theatre to engineering) have been largely unfruitful.
Software development is its own activity, and people will eventually compare
other activities to it. The newer thought model for software development as
"cooperative games of invention and communication" is holding up. The surprising
thing is that people from business management to military intelligence are already
beginning to see their fields as also being cooperative games of invention and
communication, i.e., comparing themselves to the software development thought
model. The goal of this talk is to stimulate your thinking about various activities
in the world as cooperative games of invention and communication and to share
some experiences in running software projects using the model.