Alistair Cockburn ( ) is an American computer scientist, known as one of the initiators of the agile movement in software development. He cosigned (with 17 others) the Manifesto for Agile Software Development.

Life and career

Cockburn started studying the methods of

object oriented Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm based on the concept of " objects", which can contain data and code. The data is in the form of fields (often known as attributes or ''properties''), and the code is in the form of p ...

(OO) software development for IBM. From 1994, he formed "Humans and Technology" in

Salt Lake City Salt Lake City (often shortened to Salt Lake and abbreviated as SLC) is the capital and most populous city of Utah, United States. It is the seat of Salt Lake County, the most populous county in Utah. With a population of 200,133 in 2020, th ...

. He obtained his degree in computer science at the Case Western Reserve University. In 2003 he received his PhD degree from the

University of Oslo The University of Oslo ( no, Universitetet i Oslo; la, Universitas Osloensis) is a public research university located in Oslo, Norway. It is the highest ranked and oldest university in Norway. It is consistently ranked among the top universit ...

. Cockburn helped write the

Manifesto for Agile Software Development In software development, agile (sometimes written Agile) practices include requirements discovery and solutions improvement through the collaborative effort of self-organizing and cross-functional teams with their customer(s)/ end user(s), a ...

in 2001, the agile PM Declaration of Interdependence in 2005, and co-founded the International Consortium for Agile in 2009 (with Ahmed Sidky and Ash Rofail). He is a principal expositor of the

use case In software and systems engineering, the phrase use case is a polyseme with two senses: # A usage scenario for a piece of software; often used in the plural to suggest situations where a piece of software may be useful. # A potential scenario ...

for documenting business processes and behavioral requirements for software, and inventor of the

Cockburn Scale The Cockburn Scale, also known as the Project Classification Scale, is a method of describing how much formal process a software project requires. The scale was described in Alistair Cockburn Alistair Cockburn ( ) is an American computer scien ...

for categorizing software projects. The methodologies in the Crystal family (e.g., Crystal Clear), described by Alistair Cockburn, are considered examples of

lightweight methodology A lightweight methodology is a software development method that has only a few rules and practices, or only ones that are easy to follow. In contrast, a complex method with many rules is considered a " heavyweight methodology". Examples of light ...

. The Crystal family is colour-coded to signify the "weight" of methodology needed. Thus, a large project which has consequences that involve risk to human life would use the Crystal Sapphire or Crystal Diamond methods. A small project might use Crystal Clear, Crystal Yellow or Crystal Orange. Cockburn presented his Hexagonal Architecture (2005) as a solution to problems with traditional layering, coupling and entanglement. In 2015 Alistair launched the Heart of Agile movement which is presented as a response to the overly complex state of the Agile industry.

Selected publications

*''Surviving Object-Oriented Projects'', Alistair Cockburn, 1st edition, December, 1997, Addison-Wesley Professional, . *''Writing Effective Use Cases'', Alistair Cockburn, 1st edition, January, 2000, Addison-Wesley Professional, . *''Agile Software Development'', Alistair Cockburn, 1st edition, December 2001, Addison-Wesley Professional, . *''Patterns for Effective Use Cases'', Steve Adolph, Paul Bramble, with Alistair Cockburn, Andy Pols contributors, August 2002, Addison-Wesley Professional, . *''People and Methodologies in Software Development'', Alistair Cockburn, February 2003, D.Ph. dissertation, University of Oslo PressD.Ph. dissertation online a
alistair.cockburn.us
*''Crystal Clear : A Human-Powered Methodology for Small Teams'', Alistair Cockburn, October 2004, Addison-Wesley Professional, . *''Agile Software Development: The Cooperative Game'', Alistair Cockburn, 2nd edition, October 2006, Addison-Wesley Professional, , .

References

External links

Website
{{DEFAULTSORT:Cockburn, Alistair Living people American computer programmers American technology writers

Alistair Alistair is a masculine given name. It is an Anglicised form of the Scottish Gaelic '' Alasdair''. The latter is most likely a Scottish Gaelic variant of the Norman French Alexandre or Latin Alexander, which was incorporated into English in the s ...

1953 births Case Western Reserve University alumni University of Oslo alumni People from Salt Lake City Agile software development