Tom DeMarco (1940 - )

Genre: General Fiction, Non-Fiction, Non-Fiction - Scholarly, Short Stories

Tom DeMarco (born 20 Aug. 1940), who lives in Camden, has written two novels, a collection of short stories, and several non-fiction books, as well as hundreds of articles and essays in his fields of management and the system development process. He is a principal of the Atlantic Systems Guild, a computer systems think tank with offices in New York and London. In addition to his business and writing careers, he's also a certified emergency medical technician.

DeMarco -- who earned a BSEE degree from Cornell University, an M.S. from Columbia University, and a diploma from the University of Paris at the Sorbonne -- began his computing career with Bell Telephone Laboratories, where he participated in the 1ESS project (see 1965). He was later responsible for distributed on-line banking systems installed in Europe, and he has lectured and consulted throughout the Americas, Europe, Africa, Australia and the Far East.

Most of the biographical summary above is from DeMarco's web site, which provides much more information.

DeMarco's books include:

• Structured Analysis and System Specification (1979)
• Concise Notes on Software Engineering (1979)
• Controlling Software Projects: Management, Measurement and Estimation (1982)
• Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams (1987/1999, with Tim Lister)
• Software State-of-the-Art: Selected Papers (1990, co-edited with Tim Lister)
• Why Does Software Cost So Much? (And Other Puzzles of the Information Age) (1995; essays)
• The Deadline: A Novel About Project Management (1997), the story of a veteran software manager who bets his life on a delivery date.
• Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork and the Myth of Total Efficiency (2001)
• Dark Harbor House (2001), which he describes as 'a gentle coming-of-age story that takes place in the late 1940s on an island off the coast of Maine'
• Lieutenant America and Miss Apple Pie (2002), 12 short stories, most set in Maine
• Waltzing With Bears: Managing Risk on Software Projects (2003; co-authored with Tim Lister). The first three chapters are online (PDF).

Available online is an April 1998 article in the Cutter IT Journal by DeMarco and Tim Lister entitled 'Both Sides Always Lose: Litigation of Software-Intensive Contracts,' as well as first chapters of Peopleware , Slack, and Dark Harbor House.


Last Update: 08/02/2007

(Return to List)