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.