Meetup with Alistair Cockburn

Our Zürich community of developers was graced by the visit of Alistair Cockburn, co-author of the Agile Manifesto, one of the “42 Greatest Software Professionals of All Times.”

Alistair answered our questions with the constraint of having to answer them as #stories.

Some insights that we noted were:

💡 the Agility concept really boils down to the dictionary definition of being able to #change direction quickly. 💡 this can be used not only in small software development teams but also across organisations. 💡 The more conservative and hierarchical a company or country is, the less amenable it is to pivot to an agile methodology. 💡 A very good litmus test for conservativeness is: ‘Can you bring your boss bad news?’. Norway scored well by that measure, Japan, not so well.

He recommended his recent book, #hexagonal architecture explained, and his latest refinement on the agile methodology, the heart of #Agile.