Edward Yourdon

Dec

Does the CIO reflect the culture of his organization?

I’ve begun working on a new book about CIO’s, one which involve my interviewing several of these folks around the country and various other parts of the world. I’ll give you more details about the book itself in the weeks and months to come; and I’ll also provide some impressions, opinions, and reactions as the project proceeds. At this point, I’m at the very beginning; if this was your project, you would probably start the same way I did: develop…Read More

Sep

Presentation on “Beautiful Software”

I gave a presentation a couple days ago to the NYC chapter of SPIN — that’s “Software Process Improvement Network” for those of you who might not have heard of it. The presentation was on the topic of “Beautiful Software,” and you can download a PDF version of the presentation by clicking here.

Sep

Surprise: the New York Times tell us that “the tech sector is slow to hire”

In 1989, I made my first visit to India, and met with several of the pioneers who were launching the nascent Indian IT industry. I returned subsequently for another visit, primarily to see the IT group in Motorola’s Bangalore facility, which had achieved the world’s first SEI-CMM level-5 rating; on the same trip, I met the senior executives at a little startup company called InfoSys — and as I recall, they were able to squeeze into one conference room. Sobered…Read More

Sep

Social networking for innovators

Here’s an interesting idea: an August 13, 2010 article in ICT Results, titled “Social networking for innovators,” suggests that companies should be focusing on networking tools for specific categories of people, rather than the generic-Facebook approach that aims to connect every living person on the planet, along with a few stray cats and dogs. Since most companies prize innovation quite highly, and since “innovation remains a fundamentall mysterious process, often the outcome of unexpected Eureka moments,” why not provide collaboration…Read More

Sep

Computerworld’s prediction of “5 indispensable IT skills of the future”

I tend to devour and digest most of my news on the same day that it’s published. This doesn’t always provide an opportunity for serious reflection and contemplation — but news that’s more than a day or two old, in this age of instant-everything, is like yesterday’s oatmeal. It’s like watching re-runs of the Dave Letterman show, even when you know you haven’t seen it before… Fortunately, there are exceptions, and one of them bubbled up to the top of…Read More

Aug

Whither IT – a series of prognostications

As I mentioned in a recent blog posting, I’m in the process of shifting my “serious” blogs over to this website, from their previous home at www.yourdonreport.com The old site will continue to get updates at random intervals, but mostly about non-technical topics, like the photography that I dabble in, and random social/political commentaries. One of the quasi-serious series of postings that I want to make available here is a 15-part series on the “future of IT,” which I started…Read More

Aug

Agile2010 retrospective: What I Learned From Burning My House Down

How could you not attend a conference presentation with a title like that? I hasten to add that it was not my house that burned down; I had to assume that it was a house belonging to (or somehow associated with) one of the two presenters Yves Hanouelle and Robin Dymond — and that the story had something to do with agile software development. Now that two weeks have passed, I have to admit that I’m not even surer whose…Read More

Aug

Watching “agile” move from a common-sense philosophy to an organized, detailed practice

A long time ago in a galaxy far far away — before Google, before the PC, before the widespread non-academic/military use of the Internet, perhaps even before the invention of fire and electricity — my colleagues and I were bemused and intrigued by the reaction we got from veteran software developers and project managers when we wandered all over the world (including some pretty scary places where programmers brought machine guns to work), preaching from every soap-box we could find…Read More

Aug

IT Project Confessional…

I’m in the process of shifting from my separate “Yourdon Report” blog over to my “Yourdon.com” website for blogs about serious IT subjects (as distinct from frivolous postings about gossip, sports, movies, photography, etc.). As part of the process, I’m going to post some links here to various “series” of postings that I made on the other blog, because I think you might find them useful. For example, I recently wrote a 6-part series of blog postings on the concept…Read More

Aug

Agile2010 retrospective: Scott Ambler’s “Agile Mythbusters” presentation

As I mentioned in yesterday’s blog posting, the recent Agile 2010 conference had 227 sessions, with 180 speakers. Even if I had somehow managed to attend all of them (a complete impossibility, since there often six or seven sessions running in parallel), I wouldn’t have the time, patience, or energy to report on them all. However, there were some interesting ones, and the first one I want to bring to your attention is Scott Ambler’s “agile mythbuster” presentation. Scott is…Read More