Author Archive: bfwebster
Webster is Principal and Founder at at Bruce F. Webster & Associates, as well as an Adjunct Professor for the BYU Computer Science Department. He works with organizations to help them with troubled or failed information technology (IT) projects. He has also worked in several dozen legal cases as a consultant and as a testifying expert, both in the United States and Japan. He can be reached at 303.502.4141 or at bwebster@bfwa.com.
The Mythical Man-Month by Fred Brooks, part 1 (CS 428, Winter 2019)
My in-class lecture covering the first few chapters of The Mythical Man-Month by Fred Brooks.
“The Five Orders of Ignorance” (CS 428, Winter 2019)
New semester, new posts. Here is my lecture on 1/07/2019 about the appendix “The Five Orders of Ignorance” found in Philip Armour’s book, The Laws of Software Process. I consider this to be an extremely important set of insights as to why so many software projects are late or fail altogether.
Displacing entrenched technology
Successful technology — and I’m using the term broadly here, not just limiting myself to digital tech — has a propensity to entrench itself and then become very hard to displace, at least directly. A classic example is the internal combustion automobile (which I’ll call the “gas auto” for shorthand). Commercial production started over 130 […]
CS 428 (Fall Semester, 9/11): Lecture on The Mythical Man-Month (Brooks), Chapters 1, 2, 4, 5
OK, it’s a bit embarrassing to realize it’s been nine months since I last posted here. But a new semester has started, and with it, my lectures on software engineering for CS 428 (at Brigham Young University). Here’s my lecture from the first class, covering chapters 1, 2, 4 and 5 of The Mythical Man-Month […]
CS 428 Lecture: Surviving Complexity (01/09/2017)
Here is the video of the ‘Surviving Complexity’ lecture I gave as part of the CS 428 (“Software Engineering”) class I’m teaching at Brigham Young University. Here are the slides for the lecture, which include links to the posts cited.