DeMarco, Tom (1940 - )

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

Tom DeMarco (born Aug. 20, 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. 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.

Selected Bibliography

Non-Fiction

  • 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)
  • Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork and the Myth of Total Efficiency (2001)
  • Waltzing With Bears: Managing Risk on Software Projects (2003; co-authored with Tim Lister)

Fiction

  • The Deadline: A Novel About Project Management (1997), the story of a veteran software manager who bets his life on a delivery date.
  • 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

Selected Resources