https://spectrum.ieee.org/it-management-software-failures
"“Why worry about something that isn’t going to happen?”
KGB Chairman Charkov’s question to inorganic chemist Valery Legasov in HBO’s
“Chernobyl” miniseries makes a good epitaph for the hundreds of software
development, modernization, and operational failures I have covered for
IEEE
Spectrum since my first contribution, to its September 2005 special issue on
learning—or rather, not learning—from software failures. I noted then, and it’s
still true two decades later: Software failures are universally unbiased. They
happen in every country, to large companies and small. They happen in
commercial, nonprofit, and governmental organizations, regardless of status or
reputation.
Global IT spending has more than tripled in constant 2025 dollars since 2005,
from US $1.7 trillion to $5.6 trillion, and continues to rise. Despite
additional spending, software success rates have not markedly improved in the
past two decades. The result is that the business and societal costs of failure
continue to grow as software proliferates, permeating and interconnecting every
aspect of our lives.
For those hoping AI software tools and coding copilots will quickly make
large-scale IT software projects successful, forget about it. For the
foreseeable future, there are hard limits on what AI can bring to the table in
controlling and managing the myriad intersections and trade-offs among systems
engineering, project, financial, and business management, and especially the
organizational politics involved in any large-scale software project. Few IT
projects are displays of rational decision-making from which AI can or should
learn. As software practitioners know, IT projects suffer from enough
management hallucinations and delusions without AI adding to them.
As I noted 20 years ago, the drivers of software failure frequently are
failures of human imagination, unrealistic or unarticulated project goals, the
inability to handle the project’s complexity, or unmanaged risks, to name a few
that today still regularly cause IT failures. Numerous others go back decades,
such as those identified by Stephen Andriole, the chair of business technology
at Villanova University’s School of Business, in the diagram below first
published in
Forbes in 2021. Uncovering a software system failure that has
gone off the rails in a unique, previously undocumented manner would be
surprising because the overwhelming majority of software-related failures
involve avoidable, known failure-inducing factors documented in hundreds of
after-action reports, academic studies, and technical and management books for
decades. Failure déjà vu dominates the literature.
The question is, why haven’t we applied what we have repeatedly been forced to
learn?"
Via Dave Farber.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
