I just came across a fascinating article written by Alistair Cockburn in 2004. The article is lengthy and fairly academic, but it’s well worth the time of anyone involved in software development.

In his article, Cockburn offers that software is best understood as a game and not as an engineering discipline. His use of game here is in the vein of game theory – i.e. understanding an activity as the interaction of multiple players making decisions to maximize gain.

Cockburn explores the history of engineering and chronicles the shift in understanding of it from primarily a craft to a formulaic discipline. He goes on to explain the inadequacies of framing engineering in this way and details the specific shortcomings of force-fitting software development into an engineering discipline. Rather, he suggests that viewing software development as a game is far more effective at explaining its inherent nature and reaching successful outcomes.

Those familiar with the ideas of Software Craftsmanship and Agile software development will find Cockburn’s thoughts especially intriguing.

“The end of software engineering and the start of economic-cooperative gaming“

I’ve been reading the articles on the birth of Apple’s Macintosh at folklore.org recently. Folklore.org’s purpose (to summarize its about page) is collective historical storytelling accomplished through the anecdotes of multiple contributors. Only the development of the Mac is presently chronicled. The reading is wonderfully interesting and engaging; it’s like a book I can’t put down.

Atomic Object’s history is intimately linked with eXtreme Programming (XP). These days XP is probably better known under the larger umbrella of Agile methodologies. XP was inspired by successful practices observed at work throughout the history of software development. In reading about the first Mac I’ve been encountering examples of processes and techniques that are quite familiar; perhaps these stories are similar to those that inspired XP.