Surviving Complexity
[Copyright (c) 2008 by Bruce F. Webster. All rights reserved. Last updated: 04/30/08]
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Surviving Complexity represents the third work in my “semi-planned” trilogy on software engineering and IT project management, the other two being The Art of ‘Ware and Pitfalls of Modern Software Engineering (or PMSE), which replaces Pitfalls of Object-Oriented Development.
While PMSE is, in effect, a wide-ranging and detailed collection of specific anti-patterns that can occur in IT development, Surviving Complexity tackles a relatively small set of fundamental — and, to a certain extent, intractable — problems that face any organization seeking to develop, deploy and/or market information technology. There is inevitably some overlap between the two, but the approach and level of detail is quite different. PMSE can be thought of as a Merck Manual for IT projects — look up the symptoms, figure out the root causes, apply the recommended treatment.
Surviving Complexity, by contrast, deals with foundational issues surrounding IT — issues by and large ignored or glossed over, yet causing billions of dollars of losses each year in delayed and failed IT projects, as well as in market failures, litigation, and legal issues. I deal with such issues day in and day out, both as a consultant and as a consulting/expert witness, and it troubles me to see how utterly predictable most of the troubles and failures are.
The outline below represents my on-going distillation of these fundamental factors and, as such, is subject to change without notice. In the meantime, I am writing a “Surviving Complexity” column for the online version of Baseline Magazine (Ziff Davis) and also posting draft excerpts from Surviving Complexity over at my professional website; feel free to read and comment there.
- Introduction: Confronting Complexity
- Part I: The Wetware Crisis (Human Factors)
- Chapter 1: Too Many Concertos, Not Enough Mozarts (the lack of qualified IT personnel)
- Chapter 2: All Our Sins Remembered (human nature and project management)
- Chapter 3: Negotiations and Lovesongs (game theory and the marketing-engineering chasm)
- Chapter 4: Lies, Damned Lies, and Metrics (misunderstandings and misinformation)
- Part II: Only a Few Brass Slugs (Process Factors)
- Chapter 5: Are We There Yet? (the essential complexity of SDLC methodologies)
- Chapter 6: The End of Quality (can’t ship with it, can’t ship without it)
- Chapter 7: Time out of Joint (mismatch in business, development, market and technology cycles)
- Chapter 8: The Most Perilous Task (organizational change and process re-engineering)
- Part III: The Acid of Dissemination (Information Factors)
- Chapter 9: Storing Water in a Sieve (control of organizational data and information)
- Chapter 10: The IP Civil Wars (intellectual property dispute and issues)
- Chapter 11: What is Reality? And Can I Have a Copy? (bits vs. atoms, original vs. copy, real vs. Photoshop)
- Chapter 12: The Demolished Firm (privacy, security and discovery)
- Part IV: The Leaden Age of Wireless (Technology Factors)
- Chapter 13: Cheap, Fast and Out of Control (the threatened singularity)
- Chapter 14: All Our Sins Encoded (software bloat, complexity, and inertia)
- Chapter 15: Commanding the Tide (legal and regulatory collision with technology)
- Chapter 16: Welcome to the Slow Zone (entrenchment of technology and standards)
- Conclusion: Leveraging Complexity
[back to PMSE] [up to Works in Progress] [ahead to The Art of ‘Ware]
[Copyright (c) 2008 by Bruce F. Webster. All rights reserved.]
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