David Rubinstein: Engineering? There’s the Rub
September 15, 2007 —
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I caught up with Alistair Cockburn at the Agile 2007 Conference in mid-massage. He was on the giving end, working his fingers up and down the forearm of a man who was emitting low guttural sounds as the probing deepened.
“I’m a methodologist,” Cockburn said of his view of he world, “but I try not to do massage the same way each time.” He said he uses empathy to identify pain points, so he can home in on muscles that need kneading. “When I feel the person get calm, I get calm, and the two of us are living in this greater pool of calm,” Cockburn explained. “I can do this for hours.”
Cockburn had transformed the conference’s book-signing area into a mini-spa, complete with headrest for the weary attendees he deigned to rub, but eventually the conversation turned to “Agile Software Development: The Cooperative Game, Second Edition,” the update to his seminal 2001 work, and his other current efforts, which include the creation of a university course in software engineering.
That last part might seem surprising, coming from a man who is on record as saying the term “software engineering” has no meaning. But Cockburn has revisited the term, and is now finding places where manufacturing and engineering map to software development.
“Engineering—the verb is interesting. What are the actions? They are the trade-offs in an overconstrained situation to come up with a result that’s acceptable,” Cockburn said. He went on to describe three anchors of software engineering: craft, the “cooperative game,” and the application of lean manufacturing techniques.
The craft, the hands-on portion of development, has a number of steps, including project management, deciding what to build, large-scale decisions of architecture, testing, modeling, and the small-scale decisions of programming.
The cooperative game aspect involves situations and strategies to get the team to achieve its goal, which is to deploy software and then get ready for the next deployment of software. “This is where you find out where the bottlenecks are,” Cockburn said.
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