Alistair Cockburn

Alistair Cockburn will provide us with a 1/2 day tutorial: "Designing a Light Methodology", which was rated the top tutorial at OOPSLA in 1998. It describes XP briefly, but in a larger context. It focuses on methodology as a social construction that includes the roles, skills, teaming, activities, techniques, deliverables, standards, habits and culture of the organization. Alistair will show a framework for describing methodologies, so that you can start see some of the issues in customizing a process. He will look at shifting from a lighter to a heavier methodology, illustrating with fragments of light methodologies. He concludes by considering software development as a cooperative game, in which people use markers to remind and inspire each other in getting to the end of the game: delivering the system. Learn to identify and diagnose the parts of your organization's methodology, and learn ways to make it more effective. This session is suited for experienced developers, team leaders, and process designers trying to choose or design a methodology for their organization. Thursday 13:00 - 16:00 Biography: Alistair Cockburn (pronounced "Coburn"), founder of Humans and Technology, designed the OO methodology for the IBM Consulting Group in the early-1990s, and was special advisor to the Central Bank of Norway. He is an expert on use cases, object-oriented design, project management, and methodologies. His books "Surviving OO Projects" and "Writing Effective Use Cases" are part of a new collection of books using the cooperative game model of software development, the Crystal Collection from Addison Wesley. Alistair says that he learns and forgets languages with equal ease, enjoys traveling, dancing, and sitting underwater.