How I came to write “Tidy First?” tl;dr it took 18 years
I managed to attend a few book-signings of great authors (Salman Rushdie, Richard Dawkins, and, long ago, Beverly Cleary), but would kill for this Yourdon-Constantine one, as well as the story behind it.I actually worked for a CASE vendor that started by building tools to apply Yourdon et al.'s Structured Analysis and Structured Design to important systems, in mil/aerospace/datacom.  (I was lucky to be the teen mascot on our full-lifecycle evolution of those tools, in the Portland division, and then on an R&D team at HQ for next-gen OO CASE.)Yourdon also collaborated with Peter Coad on a pair of books for OO development.To this day, I still find Yourdon et al.'s DFDs (from Structured Analysis) to be one of the first and most powerful tools for eliciting process/system understanding, from business people and techies alike, even if they've never seen it.  Put loosely, it seems half of all business/org problems lately could be solved by leading people through a DFD exercise.