Project Failure
“Pitfalls of Modern Software Engineering”: an update
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 […]
The Wetware Crisis: All Our Sins Remembered – Intro
[Copyright 2008 by Bruce F. Webster. All rights reserved. Adapted from Surviving Complexity (forthcoming).] Humanity has been developing information technology for half a century. That experience has taught us this unpleasant truth: virtually every information technology project above a certain size or complexity is significantly late and over budget or fails altogether; those that don’t […]
The Wetware Crisis: the Thermocline of Truth
[Updated 09/12/13 — fixed some links and added a few.] [Copyright 2008 by Bruce F. Webster. All rights reserved. Adapted from Surviving Complexity (forthcoming).] A thermocline is a distinct temperature barrier between a surface layer of warmer water and the colder, deeper water underneath. It can exist in both lakes and oceans. A thermocline […]
Book under development: The Art of ‘Ware (Version 2.0)
Over a decade ago, I wrote and published The Art of ‘Ware (M&T Books, 1995). The conceit of the book was simple: take Sun Tzu’s classic work The Art of War (Suntzu pingfa), written some 2500 years ago, and re-interpret it, maxim by maxim, for developing, deploying and marketing information technology (IT). Here’s an example: […]