Tom DeMarco
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Tom DeMarco (born 20 Aug. 1940 Pennsylvania, USA) is an US-American software engineer, author, teacher and speaker on software engineering topics.[1] He is known as one of the developers of Structured analysis in the 1980s.
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[edit] Biography
Tom DeMarco received a BSEE degree in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University, a M.S. from Columbia University and a diplôme from the University of Paris at the Sorbonne.[2]
DeMarco began at Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1963 where he served as part of the now-legendary ESS-1 project. This was a hardware and software endeavor to develop the world’s first commercial stored program telephone switch, now installed in telephone offices all over the world.[3] In later years, he managed real-time projects for La CEGOS Informatique in France, a French consulting firm that had a contract to build a computerized conveyor system for the new merchandise mart at La Villette in Paris. From 1971 to 1975 he was involved in building on-line banking systems in Sweden, Holland, France and finally New York. In the 1980s with Tim Lister he founded the Firm 'The Atlantic Systems Guild'. They shared offices with Dorset House, a small publisher that also spun off from Yourdon Inc. The company developed into a New York- and London-based consulting company specializing in methods and management of software development.
He has lectured and consulted throughout the Americas, Europe, Africa, Australia and the Far East.[4]
He is a member of the ACM and a Fellow of the IEEE. He lives in Camden, Maine, and is presently both a principal of The Atlantic Systems Guild, and a fellow and Senior Consultant of the Cutter Consortium.[2] DeMarco was the 1986 recipient of the Warnier Prize for "lifetime contribution to the field of computing", and the 1999 recipient of the Stevens Award for "contribution to the methods of software development".[2]
In his spare time, he is an Emergency Medical Technician, certified by his home state and by the National Registry of EMTs, and a founding member of The Penobscot Compact, a business-education partnership operating under the auspices of the Maine State Aspirations Program.[5]
[edit] Work
Tom DeMarco's particular areas of interest are project management, change facilitation, and litigation of software-intensive contracts.[6]
[edit] Structured analysis
In the 1960s DeMarco had learned to use Petri Nets and other dataflow methods in engineering and business applications. In 1974 he first came across the work of Doug Ross and John Brackett of SofTech. He thought that their tool, called SADT, was a much advanced and in some ways much more elegant variation on his network specifications. It also was the first time that he had seen the adjective "structured" applied to leveled diagrams. In 1975 DeMarco started developing his network specification concept, improved by his exposure to SADT, and combined them with ideas of Ed Yourdon, and called it Structured Analysis. This turned into a concept of writing specifications in the form of leveled dataflow diagrams with complementary data dictionary and mini-specifications.[3]
They developed the concept in a two-day training seminar, which by the end of 1975 was a huge success. DeMarco took two months to write the book "Structured Analysis and System Specification" (Prentice Hall, 1975) and a video training sequence which both subsequently became excellent royalty properties. Over the next twenty years, the method prospered. It was implemented in virtually every CASE system ever produced. When CASE went away, the method persisted. Today dataflow representation is a component of virtually every current process, though few organizations are still using his 1975 prescription in its original form (see image).[3]
[edit] Peopleware
Peopleware, a term coined by Peter G. Neumann in 1976,[7] was popularized by DeMarco and Timothy Lister's 1987 book "Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams", on the inside world of software development. Demarco and Lister argued that the major issues of software development are human, not technical. It examines the conflicts between individual work perspective and corporate ideology. Topics include team jelling, group chemistry, corporate entropy, flow time, “teamicide” and workspace theory (for optimization).
Peopleware is a book about project management. The first chapter of the book claims, "The major problems of our work are not so much technological as sociological in nature". The book approaches sociological or ‘political’ problems such as team ‘jelling’, quiet in the work environment, and the high cost of turnover.
[edit] Risk management
Project work is a risky business. Avoiding risk is a no-win proposition because risk is usually an indicator of value; when there is no risk there is no value. We need, according to DeMarco (2004)[8], to learn to run toward risk, not run away from it. If a project has no risks at all, don’t do it! But when you‘re running toward risk you also need to take certain reasonable precautions. These precautions make up the heart of the discipline called risk management.
A short list of the skills of risk management according to DeMarco would include the following: risk assessment, risk discovery brainstorming, exposure analysis, uncertainty diagramming, contingency planning, risk mitigation, monte carlo simulation, handling of unmanaged risks, incremental implementation, Earned Value Running (EVR) metrics, mastery of the five core project risks.[8]
[edit] See also
[edit] Publications
DeMarco has authored over nine books and 100 papers on project management and software development. A selection:[9]
- 1979. Structured Analysis and System Specification. Prentice Hall, ISBN 0138543801
- 1986. Controlling Software Projects: Management, Measurement, and Estimates. Prentice Hall, ISBN 0131717111
- 1987. Peopleware : Productive Projects and Teams
- 1997. The Deadline: A Novel About Project Management. Dorset House.
- 2001. Slack, Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency.
- 2003. Waltzing with Bears: Managing Risk on Software Projects. With Tim Lister. Dorset House in March, 2003.
- 2008. Adrenaline Junkies and Template Zombies: Understanding Patterns of Project Behavior. With Peter Hruschka, Tim Lister, Suzanne Robertson, James Robertson, Steve McMenamin. ISBN 978-0932633675
[edit] References
- ^ Tom DeMarco : Fellow and Senior Consultant Retrieved 24 Nov 2008
- ^ a b c Atlantic Systems Guild (2006-03-03). "Tom DeMarco". http://www.systemsguild.com/GuildSite/TDM/TDMBio.html. Retrieved on 2006-07-10.
- ^ a b c Tom DeMarco (2002) Structured Analysis: Beginnings of a New Discipline In: sd&m Conference 2001, Software Pioneers Eds.: M. Broy, E. Denert, Springer 2002.
- ^ Tom DeMarco at dorsethouse.com. Retrieved 24 Nov 2008
- ^ Tom DeMarco : principal of the Atlantic Systems Guild.
- ^ Tom DeMarco ISRC Fellow. Retrieved 24 Nov 2008.
- ^ Larry Constantine (2001). The Peopleware Papers Prentice Hall. p. xvii
- ^ a b "Risk Management is Project Management for Adults" Tom DeMarco Keynote speaker at the Eda centrum Forum 2004.
- ^ Tom DeMarco List of publications from the DBLP Bibliography Server.
[edit] External links
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