Tim Lister

Tim Lister (born 1949) is an American software engineer and author with specialty in design, software risk management, and human aspects of technological work. He is a Principal of The Atlantic Systems Guild Inc. and a fellow of the Cutter Consortium.

Lister's work with collaborator Tom DeMarco on non-technical factors affecting team and individual performance eventually resulted in their book, Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams originally published in 1987. This work was the subject of a retrospective special session of IEEE International Conference on Software 2007 commemorating 20th anniversary of its publication. Peopleware's prescriptions had mixed reception, with environmental factors like relative quiet and interrupt protection generally accepted, but other suggestions, particularly the use of enclosed space around a team in preference to open plan seating, largely ignored. The authors' Coding War Games study which supplies evidence for the book's conclusions about the effects of workplace factors on performance is still being cited in articles about workplace design more than 25 years after its initial publication. The term "Peopleware" is in general use among software practitioners to describe the extent to which an organization does or not conform to the book's proposed ideals.

Lister is one of the originators of work that characterizes organizational culture using an approach first advocated (for architecture) by Christopher Alexander et al. In this scheme, organizations are classified by the extent to which they fit or don't fit one or more of eighty six common patterns. The eighty six proposed patterns serve as an organizational "pattern language" much as Alexander's 250 patterns make up an architectural pattern language.

Lister is author or co-author of the following works:

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