Finally, there is the delight of working in such a tractable medium. The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, cre...
Fifth, when schedule slippage is recognized, the natural (and traditional) response is to add manpower. Like dousing a fire with gasoline, this makes matters worse, much worse. More fire requires more...
Cosgrove has perceptively pointed out that the programmer delivers satisfaction of a user need rather than any tangible product. And both the actual need and the user's perception of that need will ch...
Conway's Law predicts: Organizations which design systems are constrained to produce systems which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.[1] Conway goes on to point out tha...
By documenting a design, the designer exposes himself to the criticisms of everyone, and he must be able to defend everything he writes. If the organizational structure is threatening in any way, noth...
Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.
A ship on the beach is a lighthouse to the sea.(DUTCH PROVERB)
A computer program is a message from a man to a machine. The rigidly marshaled syntax and the scrupulous definitions all exist to make intention clear to the dumb engine. But a written program has ano...
This really does attack essence. Because the build-on-package phenomenon does not today affect the average MIS programmer, it is not yet very visible to the software engineering discipline. Neverthele...
The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination.
The number of months of a project depends upon its sequential constraints. The maximum number of men depends upon the number of independent subtasks.
The management question, therefore, is not whether to build a pilot system and throw it away. You will do that. The only question is whether to plan in advance to build a throwaway, or to promise to d...
Power tools for the mind. The most dramatic way to improve the productivity of management information systems (MIS) programmers is to go down to your local computer store and buy off the shelf what th...
Peopleware. A major contribution during recent years has been DeMarco and Lister's 1987 book, Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams. Its underlying thesis is that The major problems of our work ar...
Over-specified implementations cost way more than they should, with little added function or performance.
More software projects have gone awry for lack of calendar time than for all other causes combined.
I do not believe we will find the magic here. Program verification is a very powerful concept, and it will be very important for such things as secure operating system kernels. The technology does not...
For the human makers of things, the incompletenesses and inconsistencies of our ideas become clear only during implementation.
Even a small amount of use-scenario experience is better than none.
An omelette, promised in two minutes, may appear to be progressing nicely. But when it has not set in two minutes, the customer has two choices—wait or eat it raw. Software customers have had the same...