Philippe Kruchten is known as Director of Process Development (RUP) at Rational Software, and developer of the 4+1 view model. He is currently professor of software engineering, in the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, where he holds an NSERC Chair in Design Engineering. He teaches software engineering, more specifically software project management, and two interdisciplinary project courses on innovation, entrepreneurship, system engineering. Philippe does research in software architecture and software processes, with a handful of graduate students, and many collaborators around the world.

Over the years we’ve identified some of the strategies and tactics software architects use during the design of new, bold, large software-intensive systems : divide-and-conquer, brainstorming, reuse, etc.. But we also observed some strange tactics, biases, reasoning fallacies that creep in and pervert somehow the design process. They go by simple, funny or fancy names : anchoring, red herring, elephant in the room, post hoc ergo propter hoc, non sequitur, argumentum verbosium, etc. This talk will do a little illustrated catalogue of these games, with examples, and how they sometimes combine onto subtle but elaborate political plots. In other words, this talk is about cognitive biases and how they affect software development.