EDWARD YOURDON is an international computer consultant, as well as the author of two dozen books, including Death March, Rise and Resurrection of the American Programmer, and Decline and Fall of the American Programmer. His latest book, Time Bomb 2000, described the risks and technical aspects of the Y2K problem for the layman; he is currently working on a new edition of his Modern Structured Analysis book.

Ed is widely known as the lead developer of the structured analysis/design methods of the 1970s, as well as a co-developer of the Yourdon/Whitehead method of object-oriented analysis/design and the popular Coad/Yourdon OO methodology in the late 1980s and 1990s.

Ed has worked in the computer industry for 35 years, beginning when Digital Equipment Corporation hired him in 1964 to write the FORTRAN math library for the PDP-5 and the assembler for the popular PDP-8 minicomputer. During his career, he has worked on over 25 different mainframe computers and was involved in a number of pioneering computer technologies such as time-sharing operating systems and virtual memory systems. He is currently focusing on e-business and Internet development issues, as well as helping companies identify and deploy other technology-oriented "megatrends" in the new decade.

After stints with DEC and GE, a small consulting firm, and a few years as an independent consultant, Ed founded his own consulting firm, YOURDON Inc., in 1974, in order to provide educational, publishing, and consulting services in state-of-the-art software engineering technology. Over the next 12 years, the company grew to a staff of over 150 people, with offices throughout North America and Europe; as CEO of the company, he oversaw an operation that trained over 250,000 people around the world in structured programming, structured design, structured analysis, logical data modeling, and project management. YOURDON Inc. was eventually sold in 1986 and after several more mergers and acquisitions, eventually became part of CGI, the French software company that is now part of IBM. The publishing division, YOURDON Press (now part of Prentice Hall), has produced over 150 technical computer books on a wide range of software engineering topics; many of these "classics" are used as standard university computer science textbooks.

Ed is the author of over 200 technical articles; he has also written 25 computer books since 1967. Among his recent books are Death March (1997), Case Studies in Object-Oriented Analysis and Design (1996), Mainstream Objects (1995), and Object-Oriented Systems Development: An Integrated Approach (1994), as well as two earlier OO books co-authored with Peter Coad. Several of his books have been translated into Japanese, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, German, Polish, and other languages; and his articles have appeared in virtually all of the major computer journals. He is a keynote speaker at major computer conferences around the world, and he served as the conference Chairman for Digital Consulting's CASE WORLD and SOFTWARE WORLD conferences from 1990 through 1995.

Ed Yourdon received a B.S. in Applied Mathematics from MIT in 1965; he has carried out graduate work at MIT and at the Polytechnic Institute of New York. He has been appointed an Honorary Professor of Information Technology at Universidad CAECE in Buenos Aires, has lectured at MIT, Harvard, UCLA, Berkeley, and other universities around the world. He is also a member of the Advisory Council of the New Laboratory for Teaching and Learning, a joint research project of The Dalton School and Columbia University.