Bruce F. Webster

My review of Why New Systems Fail by Phil Simon is now up on Slashdot. Here’s the opening paragraph:
Over the last forty years, a small set of classic works on risks and pitfalls in software engineering and IT project management have been published and remained in print. The authors are well known, or should be: [...]

As I’ve mentioned here before, I’m writing a book called Surviving Complexity. Many of my posts here at this website have adapted from materials I’m writing for that book.
Well, now I’ve been hired by Ziff Davis Enterprises to write a weekly column on IT Management for the online version of Baseline. That column [...]

One of the books I’m currently writing is Pitfalls of Modern Software Engineering, a greatly expanded and updated version of a book I published back in the 1990s. I’ve been posted new and revised pitfalls over at my Bruce F. Webster & Associates (bfwa.com) website. To make the pitfalls a bit easier to browse, I’ve [...]

In my post on the “Dead Sea Effect“, I talk about why the overall quality of personnel in large corporate and government IT shops declines over time (short answer: the great IT engineers leave for greener pastures, the not-so-great ones stay and entrench).
So, why would IT engineers leave one of the most highly regarded, high-quality, [...]

[Note: I originally wrote about this concept in my first edition of The Art of 'Ware and was going to include it in version 2.0 of that book. However, my review of the most recent translations of the oldest manuscripts of Suntzu pingfa has led me to re-interpret the maxims for that section. As a [...]