workshops

monday

21

Habitability in a Virtual World: What Constitutes "Living" Software?

convention centre room 20

A "living" building adapts throughout its life, responding to the needs of the people who inhabit the building and the space around it. What does it mean for a software system to be living in this way? How does the task of designing and building software contribute to or detract from this "living" quality?

This workshop will explore these questions from several different perspectives:

• When do traditional object oriented concepts such as polymorphism and abstraction serve a living design?
• How can you specify a development process that enables and encourages development of a "living" software system?
• How do people "inhabit" a software system? What roles are part of the community whose "happiness, freedom, and relaxedness" defines the system's life?
• How do people in this community collaborate in the care and feeding of software systems? For instance, can Software Patterns provide an alternative to methodology-based design?

Organizer:

Nancy Lewis, ObjecTime Limited 
Email: nlewis@objectime.com  

David Laurance, Lucent Technologies