Why Does Software Cost So Much?: And Other Puzzles of the Information Age

by Tom DeMarco and E.J. Koh

Book Overview

dust cover intact. pages unmarked. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 093263334X
• ISBN13: 9780932633347
• Release Date: January 1995
• Publisher: Dorset House Publishing Company, Incorporated
• Length: 237 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.4" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

Better than The Deadline!

I first read the Deadline and then this book. And this should be the order in which you read these books. Why does software... is a collection of essays on software programming and management of these activities. It's a nice collection of easy to read essays which will spark your thinking about these issues. And of course it is about the two things (among many other sideline topics) Tom DeMarco is famous for: Measurement, People Management and Structured Analysis. And as you can expect from a DeMarco it praises User centric design, Advanced Measurement and heavily criticizes the ideas of factory like programming, Lean = "organizational bulimia", and the futurists movement. And if you are the head of IT development in your company - it is the perfect gift to give any of your business counterparts on the 2nd week of your project.

Do you work as a software engineer or software manager?

Then I think this is a required read. It's funny, insightful and so true to life it's almost scary.

the "oops! i did it again" of software engineering

DeMarco did it again. This book fully achieves the two things i expect from any good book: it made me laugh and it made me think. It made me laugh about the crazy industry we are working in, and it made me think about my own managerial techniques (or the lack of them). It is true that it contains some essays about things that do not seem to be appropiate, but the A/V essay is very interesting, and does show that software costs can be reduced with creativity instead of pressure.

Unspoken truths are still truths

It seems that in every field of human endeavor, there are things that are true, but for whatever reason are unspoken and ignored. The reasons for this are many, but a partial list includes: fear of failure, fear of losing face, time pressures, rigid rules and tradition. Software development is no different and Tom DeMarco is a speaker of the truth. In this collection of marvelous essays, he points out many of the well-known but neglected principles that generate problems in software projects. The leading essay points out that software creation is hard and we demand a great deal from our software. So much of our societal infrastructure is controlled by software and most of it built in a relatively short time. Furthermore, there is no legacy of experience in building software that there is for building hard infrastructure items such bridges and roads. We are still conducting what is essentially on the job training. Another simple, significant, yet overlooked point is that the sociology of a project is more important than the technology. The efficiency of a programmer during any individual day is often influenced more by the fight with a boyfriend or girlfriend than it is by having the latest tools. Software is built by the effective working of the human brains and the tools just make the output easier to capture. Once again, DeMarco is at his best, namely when he is writing more about sociology and psychology than about the technical aspects of computing. This book should be mandatory reading for anyone in the process of building a development team.

Eminently readable and well thought out. Good Stuff.

DeMarco is a wonderful writer...easy, even fun, to read, and this book is full of very worthwhile material. It has the shortcoming of being a collection of articles, so don't expect a coherent beginning, middle and end; and you may find that you agree with the author in one chapter and disagree in the next. I found, though, that I even enjoyed the stuff with which I didn't agree. DeMarco's thinking and his writing style are that good.