This is a very interesting way of looking at Agile. The talk is a based on an assumption – that the people involved in software development processes deserve more attention. I agree with the many of the points made in the talk, particularly around the intangible nature of the software we build. Which is one of the reasons we are still, as an industry, trying to discover the best practises, and a true sense of engineering discipline.

Its well worth watching this talk, especially to get a different perspective on Agile, focusing on the social and cognitive effects. She used the Prisoners Dilemma to illustrate some of these points and to be honest I had never thought of Software Engineering in those terms, yet as a metaphor it fits so very well,

in software engineering this is reflected in the fact that software is an intangible product so sometimes we cannot verify that our colleagues behave in the same way … so what Agile software development does is it banishes the inability to verify that co-operation is reciprocated, by increasing the process transparency, in such a way it banishes the working assumption of the prisoners dilemma.