Imagination and Process Failures
Article in the SD Times: Imagination, process failures doom software projects:
Scores of well-publicized software failures have taken a toll on careers, lives and resources, yet projects continue to fail at an alarming rate. Top programming experts, though, say that there are commonalities to these failures that, if avoided, can help organizations achieve greater success.
Sixty-eight percent of software projects were either challenged or failed, according to The Standish Group’s 2009 “Chaos” study, representing a “marked decrease in project success rates” for the year. Challenged projects are defined as being late, over budget, or having less than the required features and functions.
The root causes of failure are not difficult to identify. “Most cases of failure that I have seen have been in two categories: imagination and process,” said Grady Booch, chief scientist of software engineering at IBM Research.
Common process problem areas that were cited by the experts include requirements failures, failure to validate and verify requirements, failure to adhere to architecture, lack of contingency planning, failure to learn from mistakes, and the absence of best practices in developing conversion software.
An implementation of a requirement that seemingly is correct might actually be incomplete. For example, a Pennsylvania man could not receive a driver’s license after a computer system indicated that he was dead, because programmers did not include any way to “resurrect him,” said Richard Riehle, a visiting professor at the Naval Postgraduate School, a U.S defense institution in Monterey, Calif. that provides education and research programs for the United States and its allied forces.
Oddly enough, if you’ve worked QA long enough, you see these same sorts of failures over and over again. If you’re like me, you feel a little like Cassandra without the eventual comfort of the sacking of Troy to put an end to your misery. However, when every project starts becoming challenged, usually within the first couple of days or weeks or approaching the first deadline or milestone, people in the team start throwing best practices out and begin doing the cheap, ill-conceived shortcuts that lead to the problems.
There’s your failure of imagination. Failing to imagine something that works.
