''Decline and Fall of the American Programmer'' is a book written by

Edward Yourdon Edward Nash Yourdon (April 30, 1944 – January 20, 2016) was an American software engineer, computer consultant, author and lecturer, and software engineering methodology pioneer. He was one of the lead developers of the structured analysis tech ...

in 1992. It was addressed to American programmers and

software Software is a set of computer programs and associated software documentation, documentation and data (computing), data. This is in contrast to Computer hardware, hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. ...

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

India India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the so ...

n 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 In folklore, a bullet cast from silver is often one of the few weapons that are effective against a werewolf or witch. The term ''silver bullet'' is also a metaphor for a simple, seemingly magical, solution to a difficult problem: for example, pe ...

*3.

Peopleware ''Peopleware'' can refer to anything that has to do with the role of people in the development or use of computer software and hardware systems, including such issues as developer productivity, teamwork, group dynamics, the psychology of program ...

*4.

Software Process In software engineering, a software development process is a process of dividing software development work into smaller, parallel, or sequential steps or sub-processes to improve design, product management. It is also known as a software devel ...

es *5. Software Methodologies *6. CASE *7.

Software Metrics In software engineering and development, a software metric is a standard of measure of a degree to which a software system or process possesses some property. Even if a metric is not a measurement (metrics are functions, while measurements are t ...

*8.

Software Quality Assurance Software quality assurance (SQA) is a means and practice of monitoring all software engineering processes, methods, and work products to ensure compliance against defined standards. It may include ensuring conformance to standards or models, suc ...

*9.

Software Reusability In computer science and software engineering, reusability is the use of existing ''assets'' in some form within the software product development process; these ''assets'' are products and by-products of the software development life cycle and in ...

*10. Software Re-Engineering *11. Future Trends *A. Software Technology in India *B. The Programmer's Bookshelf

Release details

* Prentice Hall, , 1992; hardback * Prentice Hall, , June 16, 1993; paperback

Chapter outline

Release details

See also