Making IT work since 1974.
By bfwebster on Jul 10, 2008 in Development, Main, Product development, Software engineering | 1 Comment
The very first class I took when starting my computer science degree from Brigham Young University was CS 131. I forget the course title, but the teacher was Dr. Alan Ashton, a quiet, self-effacing but brilliant professor who would later become very, very rich by developing — along with Bruce Bastian (with whom I shared [...]
By bfwebster on Jun 9, 2008 in Development, Main, Software engineering | 1 Comment
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 [...]
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 21, 2008 in Business, Competition, Main, Product development, Quality assurance, Software engineering, Surviving Complexity | 1 Comment
[Copyright 2008 by Bruce F. Webster. All rights reserved. Adapted from Surviving Complexity (forthcoming).] And so, from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe, And then, from hour to hour, we rot and rot; And thereby hangs a tale. – William Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act II, Scene vii. I have observed a pattern [...]
By bfwebster on May 14, 2008 in Development, Main, Management, Project Failure, Software engineering, Surviving Complexity | 0 Comments
[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 [...]