“Death March” at Parsons New School for Design

I’m giving a 2-hour presentation on “Death March” projects at the Parsons New School for Design in New York City tomorrow (October 31st). I took a version of the presentation that I gave in Russia last month, made a few modifications, and then told Apple’s Keynote program to skip roughly half of the slides. But I’ve uploaded […]

Peopleware seminar in St. Petersburg, Russia

I’m giving a one-day seminar presentation on “Peopleware” in St. Petersburg, Russia on Sep 22nd. If you’d like to download the 3-megabyte PDF file, click on the icon below.

Risk Management in San Antonio, TX

On June 3rd, 2008, I’m giving a presentation on “Risk management in a competitive economic environment” at a CIO breakfast round-table in San Antonio, TX – sponsored by Computer Aid. If you’re a CIO or director-level IT manager in the San Antonio area, take a look at the details, and consider coming along. But if […]

Detroit presentation: “The Politics of Metrics”

I’ll be in Detroit on Tuesday, April 15th, giving a presentation on “The Politics of Metrics” at the “Software Best Practices” conference. If you’re not there in person, you’ll miss all of the clever jokes, subtle explanations, question-answer dialogue, etc.; but you can download the 1.5-megabyte PDF version of the presentation by clicking on the […]

Adrenalin Junkies and Template Zombies

Every couple of years, my friend Tom DeMarco turns the computing world upside down with a new book. Sometimes he writes alone (see, for example, Slack: getting past burnout, busywork, and the myth of total efficiency and The Deadline: a novel about project management). Often, he writes with our mutual friend and colleague, Tim Lister […]

Top Ten Software Engineering Ideas, Albany-style

I’m participating in a “Software Best Practices” seminar in Albany tomorrow (click here for details on future venues of this seminar, hosted by IT Metrics & Productivity Institute — including Ft. Lauderdale and Austin next week), and I’ll be giving a talk on the “Top Ten Software Engineering Ideas.”

To download the 20.5-megabyte PDF of the […]

IEEE Software’s publication of “Celebrating Peopleware’s 20th Anniversary”

Back in May, I participated in a panel session at an ICSE conference in Minneapolis — before the bridge fell down, and before its airport men’s room became so notorious — in which we celebrated the 20th anniversary publication of Peopleware, by Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister. My report on that panel session can be […]

ICSE peopleware panel session

I had the great honor and pleasure of participating in a retrospective panel session on peopleware last week at the International Conference on Software Engineering (aka ICSE 2007) in Minneapolis, with some of the luminaries in the software field: Fred Brooks, Barry Boehm, Tom DeMarco, Tim Lister, and Linda Rising. The panel — celebrating the […]

Tom DeMarco’s observation on Wiki Terror

My friend Tom DeMarco, a software guru and co-author (among other things) of the highly acclaimed Waltzing With Bears, commented on the blog that I wrote a couple days ago about Wiki Terror:
“There was a much more public proposal made last year that would address this same issue in a crowd-sourcing approach, though not a […]

Tom DeMarco’s recommendation of “Games with a Purpose”

My friend Tom DeMarco sent an email note this morning to a few of his colleagues, in which he made several eloquent points about History, Culture, Science, and the Nature of Man (at least as it pertains to the IT industry), as a preamble to recommending an article by Luis von Ahn in the June […]