I really need to introduce Alistair Cockburn do I. You think you know him? Wait 'til question 3 ...
Q1. Hi Alistair, Tell me about yourself, especially, how did you get to be so damned brilliant? I don't say that lightly but some people I know go all gooey eyed when talking about your work and I reckon your approach to writing Use Cases gives sliced bread a run for its money. What's your story? What got you here? And, what does your wife think of all this agile stuff?
That's one question? Can't wait to see the rest!
Many thanks for the kind words ... There are enough people around me who think I'm incredibly stupid that maybe they sort of offset each other – kind of like the man with his feet in the freezer and his head in the over but who is, on average, at a comfortable temperature.
One of the things fairly unique about my background is we moved around a lot – My parents were English and wanted to get out of England after WW II, their goal was (a) to get far away from England, and (b) to travel the world. They dropped kids, in succession, in London (in the London Zoo to be exact), Kansas, Colorado, and Bangladesh. I was one of the ones dropped in Colorado. We lived there for almost a year after that before moving somewhere else. (Some people ask me where I was born; when I say "Just outside Denver", they say, "Oh!" as though they understand something, as though that fact might actually have any meaning.)
My father was an outside-the-box thinker and pretty headstrong. He nearly didn't get his MD degree because he kept disagreeing with one of the professors about some theory about the origin of diseases. He was an early epidemiologist. One of his earliest theories in the late 1950s was that diseases and parasites evolved along with homo whichever, all the way from pre-apes to modern humans. He couldn't get people to write about that in the US in the late 1950s because of the Christian evolutionist lock on science (so recently!). His book Evolution and Eradication of Ancient Diseases was published in 1963. He started a paleopathology movement, arranging multi-disciplinary autopsies on mummies. That was while I was in college, so I'd come home to see him discussing these trial autopsies (see http://ambassadors.net/archives/issue13/selected_studies.htm for more on him).
Between my mother's arts-literary nature, my father's outside-the-box research and our constant moving (Sri Lanka, Massachusetts, Bangladesh, Ohio, Sweden, Detroit, Scotland, Cleveland, Salt Lake City), I had to adjust to many cultures and never got to be believing that one could be right ... quite different from home-folk in most parts of the world. I suspect this shows in the way the Crystal family of methodologies is constructed, and I believe you'll see it leak out on almost every page if you're looking for it.
I graduated from a city high school in Detroit at age 15, and went to be an exchange student to Sweden (1969-70) to kill a year before college. That got me hooked on travel even more. I arranged my own junior year abroad at St. Andrews. When I got married, I checked first with my wife-to-be that it would be OK to move to Europe for a few years. A few turned to seven, at the IBM Research Lab just outside Zurich, where I worked on formal specification techniques for a while (an interesting precursor to methodologies, and one I dip back into every now and then) ... and that's where our two oldest children were born. We moved back to the US for a while, but I got itchy feet and sent myself plus family to Norway in 1997, where I worked with the Central Bank of Norway. Along the way, I discovered I like learning languages, so now I speak some extent of French, German, Swiss German dialect, Swedish and Norwegian. I tried to learn Farsi back in the late 1970s, but then the Shah got overthrown and I've never been there to tamp it down (sigh).
My wife is an artist. While I used to work in computer graphics at Evans & Sutherland, we had a lot to talk about. We still argue over additive versus subtractive colors. She's an outside-the-box thinker herself, tolerant, smart and self-motivated --- she would have to be or we'd never have been able to put up with each other for 28 years! Thanks to her, I have sculptures of skeleton faces and bones in my living room. Thanks to me (and my father), we have a smallpox mask from India – a two-foot high scary face with tongue sticking out and snakes coming out of the head – hanging in our front entry way.
Agile comes easy to her – all she has to do is change her mind at any moment!
Anyway, you get a picture of our home life ;-).
Our kids grew up thinking this was normal :-). They're teenagers by now, so they don't any more, of course.
And regarding the word "normal", when my middle son Sean was in calculus last year, we realized that the "normal to a curve" is perpendicular to the tangent at that point, i.e., the vector pointing farthest away from the rest of the curve at that point. So now my kids have fun calling me "normal."
That was a freaking long question (answer). Sorry about that.
[If you feel comfortable here Alistair, I suspect people would love to
hear a little about your home life]
Not too much to say. Since leaving IBM in 1994, I live in Salt Lake City and do most of my writing in coffee shops (for example, right now). I wrote Surviving Object-Oriented Projects and Writing Effective Use Cases at the Beans & Brew coffee shop just below the ski resorts; I wrote Agile Software Development largely at the Salt Lake Roasting Company, Crystal Clear and my doctoral thesis at the Salt Lake Coffee Break (open till 2 a.m. every day!), and these days sit mostly at the Two Creeks coffee (good for articles, but not for books – for that I still need the Salt Lake Coffee Break :-).
I keep travel down to 50% so that I have enough home life for our family to survive; and I write books to have a good reason to stay home. Lately, I haven't been writing a book, so my travel time's been going up again. Ugh.
I swim competitively, mostly every lunch time when I'm home to keep fit and to keep motivated. My goal over the last 4 years has been to break every Utah swim record (short course yards) in the 50-54 age group. That obliges me to change events every year. I have 14 of the 18, but only 5 meets left – I don't think I'll get the last two, but I hope to get two more before time runs out.
Swimming and traveling don't go well together, mostly because I don't have enough discipline to train on my own while on the road.
