Tag: Software Architecture
Software Development Failure Rates
In 2008, IBM reported that 60% of IT projects fail. In 2009, ZDNet reported that 68% of software projects fail.
By 2018, Information Age reported that number had worsened to 71% of software projects being considered failures. Deloitte characterized our failure rate as “appalling.” It warns that 75% of Enterprise Resource Planning projects fail, and Smart Insights reveals that 84% of digital transformation projects fail.
In 2017 Tech Republic reported that big data projects fail 85% of the time.
According to McKinsey, 17% of the time, IT projects go so badly that they threaten the company’s very existence.
Hewitt, Eben. Semantic Software Design
Netscape Navigator and Fax Machines – Filing for Unemployment in NY
As he and many others discovered, the state’s archaic systems were woefully unprepared for the deluge of claims. In Mr. Islam’s case, he said it took him four days to reach someone who could explain what he had to do to complete the application process.
State officials admitted as recently as last summer that there were problems with the technology used for such applications, describing New York’s unemployment-insurance systems as relics from the heyday of mainframe computers.
…
Would-be applicants’ frustration grew as their computer screens froze repeatedly and their calls went unanswered for days. Some attempts to apply for benefits yielded a pop-up message that suggested using Netscape, a browser that effectively no longer exists.
He Needs Jobless Benefits. He Was Told to Find a Fax Machine.
Thousands of newly unemployed New Yorkers desperate to stay afloat are being frustrated by the state’s 1970s-era technology.
Patrick McGeehan
NY Times
Lessons for creating good open source software, Eric Raymond
- Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer’s personal itch.
- Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse).
- Plan to throw one [version] away; you will, anyhow. (Copied from Frederick Brooks’ The Mythical Man-Month)
- If you have the right attitude, interesting problems will find you.
- When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor.
- Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging.
- Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers.
- Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone.
- Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around.
- If you treat your beta-testers as if they’re your most valuable resource, they will respond by becoming your most valuable resource.
- The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better.
- Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong.
- Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away. (Attributed to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry)
- Any tool should be useful in the expected way, but a truly great tool lends itself to uses you never expected.
- When writing gateway software of any kind, take pains to disturb the data stream as little as possible—and never throw away information unless the recipient forces you to!
- When your language is nowhere near Turing-complete, syntactic sugar can be your friend.
- A security system is only as secure as its secret. Beware of pseudo-secrets.
- To solve an interesting problem, start by finding a problem that is interesting to you.
- Provided the development coordinator has a communications medium at least as good as the Internet, and knows how to lead without coercion, many heads are inevitably better than one.
- When the next generation inevitably stumbles for the second time around on the first contention, doff cap and take heed;
* Eric Raymond, via wikipedia