The Best of Times, the Worst of Times

The best software organizations control their projects to meet defined quality targets. They accurately predict software delivery dates months or years in advance. They deliver their software projects within budget, and their productivity is constantly improving. Their staff morale is high, and their customers are highly satisfied.

  • A telecom company needed to change about 3,000 lines of code in a code base of about 1 million lines of code. They made their changes so carefully that a year later no errors had been found in operation. Their total time to make the changes including requirements analysis, design, construction, and testing was 9 hours.[2]

  • A team developing software for the United States Air Force committed to a one-year schedule and a $2 million budget even though other credible bids for the project had run as high as two years and $10 million. When the team delivered the project one month early, the project manager said the team's success arose from using techniques that have been known for years but that are rarely used in practice.[3]

  • An aerospace company develops software for companies on a fixed-price basis. Three percent of its projects overrun their budgets; ninety-seven out of a hundred meet their targets.[4]

  • An organization that committed to achieving outstanding quality attained an average of 39 percent reduction in its post-release defect rate every year for a period of 9 years a cumulative reduction of 99 percent.[5]

In addition to these notable successes, software pumps billions of dollars into the economy every year, both directly through sales of software itself and indirectly through improved efficiency and through creation of products and services that are made possible only with software's support.

The practices needed to create good software have been well established and readily available for 10 to 20 years or more. Despite some amazing triumphs, however, the software industry is not living up to its full potential. There is a wide gulf between the average practice and the best, and many of the practices in widespread use are seriously outdated and underpowered. Performance of the average software project leaves much to be desired, as many well-known disasters will attest.

  • The IRS bumbled an $8 billion software modernization program that cost the United States taxpayers $50 billion per year in lost revenue.[6]

  • The FAA's Advanced Automation System overran its planned budget by about $3 billion.[7]

  • Problems with the baggage handling system caused a delay of more than a year in opening Denver International Airport. Estimates of the delay's cost ranged as high as $1.1 million per day.[8]

  • The Ariane 5 rocket blew up on its maiden launch because of a software error.[9]

  • The B-2 bomber wouldn't fly on its maiden flight because of a software problem.[10]

  • Computer-controlled ferries in Seattle caused more than a dozen dock crashes, resulting in damage worth more than $7 million. The state of Washington recommended spending more than $3 million to change the ferries back to manual controls.[11]

Many projects that are lower profile than these are equally troubled. Roughly 25 percent of all projects fail outright,[12] and the typical project is 100 percent over budget at the point it's cancelled. Fifty percent of projects are delivered late, over budget, or with less functionality than desired.[13]

At the company level, these cancelled projects represent tremendous lost opportunity. If projects that are ultimately cancelled could be shut down at 10 percent of their intended budgets rather than 200 percent, imagine what a company could do by redirecting those resources at projects that were not ultimately cancelled.

At the national level, cancelled projects represent prodigious economic waste. A rough calculation suggests that cancelled software projects currently impose about a $40 billion drain on the United States economy.[14]

When projects succeed, they can still present risks to the public safety or welfare. A project lead at Lotus received a call from a surgeon who was using a spreadsheet to analyze patient data during open-heart surgery.[15] Newsweek magazine printed pictures of soldiers using Microsoft Excel on laptop computers to plan operations, and the Excel technical support team has received calls from the battlefield during active military operations.



Professional Software Development(c) Shorter Schedules, Higher Quality Products, More Successful Projects, [... ]reers
Professional Software Development(c) Shorter Schedules, Higher Quality Products, More Successful Projects, [... ]reers
ISBN: N/A
EAN: N/A
Year: 2005
Pages: 164

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