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17 Works 3,213 Members 47 Reviews 5 Favorited

About the Author

Tom DeMarco draws on his experience both as participant and manager of large systems development projects, among them development of the first commercial stored-program telephone switching center at Bell Telephone Laboratories, and of distributed on-line banking systems in Europe. He is author of show more Structured Analysis and System Specification and of Concise Notes on Software Engineering, also published by Yourdon Press. show less
Image credit: ATLANTIC SYSTEMS GUILD

Works by Tom DeMarco

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Common Knowledge

Canonical name
DeMarco, Tom
Birthdate
1940-08-20
Gender
male
Nationality
USA
Country (for map)
USA

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Reviews

A little dated in some ways but still extremely topical in most others. Really nice thinking about how people can work best and what keeps them from doing so.
 
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danielskatz | 22 other reviews | Dec 26, 2023 |
Insightful read on how to manage teams and organizations to increase effectiveness, and how "efficiency" is the wrong way to go about it, by one of my favorite writers about management. Lots of lessons I wish I had learned before...
 
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zeh | 6 other reviews | Jun 3, 2023 |
Easily one of the best books I've read in recent times. Made me understand a lot more about what works and what doesn't (and why) in the field of software development. It's an old, classic book, but reads as if it had been written yesterday.
 
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zeh | 22 other reviews | Jun 3, 2023 |
I re-read this book periodically to re-learn some of the many lessons in it. [author: DeMarco] says a lot about "the white space" in your organization and [book: Slack] was one of the books I quoted from in my presentation earlier this year on Managing in the White Space of your Organization. He writes about being a leader, what this really means and what it doesn't mean. He writes about efficiency and effectiveness and how it is easy to have one or the other and very difficult (but ideal) to have both.

And mostly he writes about slack: that extra bit of time to think, to re-invent, to create and communicate, that extra bit of resources that you need to adjust quickly to changing environments.

By being too efficient (going somewhere fast), we sometimes forget about being effective (where are we going?) -- quoting Yogi Berra, he observes "We're lost, but we're making good time."
… (more)
 
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Jeffrey_G | 6 other reviews | Nov 22, 2022 |

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Works
17
Members
3,213
Popularity
#7,963
Rating
4.2
Reviews
47
ISBNs
57
Languages
5
Favorited
5

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