Decline and Fall of the American Programmer

Decline and Fall of the American Programmer
Author(s)	Edward Yourdon
Cover artist	Bruce Kenselaar
Country	United States of America
Publisher	Prentice Hall
Publication date	1992
Media type	Print (Hardback)
Pages	352 (first edition)
ISBN	0-13-203670-3
OCLC Number	25281663
Dewey Decimal	005.1 20
LC Classification	QA76.6 .Y64 1992
Followed by	Rise and Resurrection of the American Programmer

Decline and Fall of the American Programmer is a book written by Edward Yourdon in 1992. It was addressed to American programmers and software organizations of the 1990s, warning that they were about to be driven out of business by programmers in other countries who could produce software more cheaply and with higher quality. Yourdon claimed that American software organizations could only retain their edge by using technologies such as ones he described in the book. (These are listed in the chapter outline below.) Yourdon gave examples of how non-American — specifically Indian and Japanese — companies were making use of these technologies to produce high-quality software.

In the follow-up book Rise and Resurrection of the American Programmer, published in 1996, Yourdon reversed some of his original predictions based upon changes in the state of the software industry.

Chapter outline

• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Lure of the Silver Bullet
• 3. Peopleware
• 4. Software Processes
• 5. Software Methodologies
• 6. CASE
• 7. Software Metrics
• 8. Software Quality Assurance
• 9. Software Reusability
• 10. Software Re-Engineering
• 11. Future Trends
• A. Software Technology in India
• B. The Programmer's Bookshelf

Release details

• 1992, United States of America, Prentice Hall, ISBN 0-13-203670-3, 1992; hardback
• 1993, United States of America, Prentice Hall, ISBN 0-13-191958-X, June 16, 1993; paperback

See also

• The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, to which this book's title is a reference
• Peopleware, by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister

External links

• Review of Rise and Resurrection of the American Programmer