Bruce F. Webster

I previously discussed the up-and-down cycle of college enrollment in computer science and related fields. More accurately put, there have been two large peaks in computer science enrollment: one in the mid- to late 1980s (which happens to be when I was teaching CS at Brigham Young University) and another right around the turn of [...]

In response to my Baseline columns on metrics (Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3), I received the following e-mail:
I read your column with great interest as I’m involved on an IT project to measure productivity. May I ask you a quick question? Are there any mature metrics that can measure tester productivity improvement month by month and [...]

The following document is the actual text — carefully redacted — of a memo I wrote some time back [i.e., several years ago] after performing an IT project review; names and identifying concepts have been changed to preserve confidentiality (and protect the guilty). The project in question was a major IT re-engineering effort for a [...]

In my earlier post on the “thermocline of truth“, I wrote:
Second, IT engineers by nature tend to be optimists, as reflected in the common acronym SMOP: “simple matter of programming.” Even when an IT engineer doesn’t have a given subsystem completed, he tends to carry with him the notion that he whip everything into shape [...]

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 [...]