By bfwebster on Oct 5, 2011 in Art of 'Ware, Books, Business, Competition, Main, Marketing, Product development, Professionalism | 0 Comments
The second personal computer I ever owned[1] was an Apple II, with no floppy drive. I bought it, along with a small color TV, from my close friend Robert Trammel while we were both living in Houston sometime around 1980.We had already spent hours together programming on it, then carefully (though not always successfully) saving [...]
By bfwebster on Jul 15, 2009 in Books, Hiring, Main, Surviving Complexity | 0 Comments
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 [...]
By bfwebster on Jun 5, 2008 in Articles, Books, Main, Surviving Complexity | 0 Comments
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 is [...]
By bfwebster on May 29, 2008 in Books, PMSE, Product development, Project Failure, Software engineering | 0 Comments
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 [...]
By bfwebster on May 5, 2008 in Books, Hiring, Main, Management, Surviving Complexity | 3 Comments
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, [...]