Blogosphere: Best of Blogs

Different software development projects fail in different ways ”and, unfortunately , too many of them fail ”but it is possible to identify a number of common symptoms that characterize these kinds of projects: ^[2] , ^[3]

^[2] Capers Jones, Patterns of Software Systems Failure and Success . London: International Thompson Computer Press, 1996.

^[3] Edward Yourdon, Death March: Managing "Mission Impossible " Projects . Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1997.

• Inaccurate understanding of end- user needs

• Inability to deal with changing requirements

• Modules that don't fit together

• Software that's hard to maintain or extend

• Late discovery of serious project flaws

• Poor software quality

• Unacceptable software performance

• Team members in each other's way, making it impossible to reconstruct who changed what, when, where, and why

• An untrustworthy build-and-release process

Unfortunately, treating these symptoms does not treat the disease. For example, the late discovery of serious project flaws is only a symptom of larger problems, namely, subjective project status assessment and undetected inconsistencies in the project's requirements, designs, and implementations .

Although different projects fail in different ways, it appears that most of them fail because of a combination of the following root causes:

• Ad hoc requirements management

• Ambiguous and imprecise communication

• Brittle architectures

• Overwhelming complexity

• Undetected inconsistencies in requirements, designs, and implementations

• Insufficient testing

• Subjective assessment of project status

• Failure to attack risk

• Uncontrolled change propagation

• Insufficient automation