Annotated Bibliography and References - The Technical and Social History of Software Engineering - page 440

freely prescribed. There was no Food and Drug Administration at that time. Paul
Starr's book should be read by every person interested in software process im-
provement or in improving software engineering college programs.
Weinberg, Gerald M. The Psychology of Computer Programming . Van
Nostrand Reinhold, New York, 1971.
Weinberg's classic book came out in 1971 as software was rapidly expanding
and on its way to becoming a major industry with millions of practitioners. (Wein-
berg and I were colleagues at IBM during the same decades, as were Fred Brooks
and Watts Humphrey.) Jerry's classic book was the first to examine the tasks asso-
ciated with software development from a psychological standpoint.
Yourdon, Edward. Decline and Fall of the American Programmer . Prentice
Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1993.
Ed Yourdon is a well-known author, public speaker, and software management
consultant. He also does expert witness work in software litigation. (Ed Yourdon
and I have been expert witnesses in several cases, once on opposite sides and once
on the same side.) Among Ed's books relevant to software engineering are Death
March , Rise and Resurrection of the American Programmer , CIOs (per Web) at
Work , and quite a few more.
This topic was selected because it was published when offshore outsourcing
to India, China, Russia, and other countries with low labor costs were generating
alarm among the U.S. software engineering community. The theme of this topic is
that U.S. software could be world class and highly competitive if we used effect-
ive methods, including effective quality control. The lessons in this topic remain
valid even today.
The title of Ed's book is, of course, a derivative of Gibbon's famous history
book, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire .