Bruce F. Webster

Sorry I haven’t posted much lately; I actually have a few posts in draft status, but I’m currently in Dallas, pouring over hundreds of pages of source code listings (Z8 assembler, anyone?) and haven’t had a chance to finish up any of them. In the meantime, here’s my latest Baseline column on the challenges of [...]

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 [...]