Tom DeMarco

Tom DeMarco (born 20 August 1940) is a well-known author, teacher, and speaker on software engineering topics. He 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".

Quotes

• You can't control what you can't measure
  • Controlling Software Projects, Management Measurement & Estimation, (1982), p. 3.

• The business of software building isn't really high-tech at all. It's most of all a business of talking to each other and writing things down. Those who were making major contributions to the field were more likely to be its best communicators than its best technicians.
  • Why Does Software Cost So Much?: And Other Puzzles of the Information Age, (1995), p. 218.

• It's not what you don't know that kills you but what you know that isn't so.
  • The Deadline (1997), p. 284.

• A day lost at the beginning of project hurts just as much as a day lost at the end.
  • The Deadline (1997).

Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams (1987)

Tom DeMarco (1987) Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams.

• People under pressure don’t work better; they just work faster.
  • p. 18.

• Quality is free, but only to those who are willing to pay heavily for it.
  • p. 23.

• While the machines have changed enormously, the business of software development has been rather static.
  • p. 32.

• The manager's function is not to make people work, but to make it possible for people to work.
  • p. 34.

Quotes about Tom DeMarco

• Systems engineering as an approach and methodology grew in response to the increase size and complexity of systems and projects... This engineering approach to the management of complexity by modularization was re-deployed in the software engineering discipline in the 1960s and 1970s with a proliferation of structured methodologies that enabled the the analysis, design and development of information systems by using techniques for modularized description, design and development of system components. Yourdon and DeMarco's Structured Analysis and Design, SSADM, James Martin's Information Engineering, and Jackson's Structured Design and Programming are examples from this era. They all exploited modularization to enable the parallel development of data, process, functionality and performance components of large software systems. The development of object orientation in the 1990s exploited modularization to develop reusable software. The idea was to develop modules that could be mixed and matched like Lego bricks to deliver to a variety of whole system specifications. The modularization and reusability principles have stood the test of time and are at the heart of modern software development.
  • Peter Allen, Steve Maguire, Bill McKelvey (2011) The SAGE Handbook of Complexity and Management. p. 35.