Software Development Failures (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "The use of information technology (IT) has become pervasive in the management of organizations in the public and private sectors in today's information economy; it..." (more)
Key Phrases: socioorganizational factors, unrealistic project goals, abandoned software projects, Standish Group, United States, United Airlines (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"For anyone who has ever wondered why software development is so prone to failure and what can be done about it, Ewusi-Mensah's work provides valuable insights. This book makes a compelling argument for learning from software development failures, so that the same mistakes aren't repeated in future projects."
—Mark Keil, Professor, Department of Computer Information Systems, Georgia State University

"It is an axiom of adult understanding that we learn most from mistakes. But they don't have to be our mistakes. In Software Development Failures, Kweku Ewusi-Mensah has created a powerful instrument for knowledge transfer that could well save a few projects, reputations, and skins. This well researched and annotated treatise offers many insights into the reasons why software projects fail. There are the usual suspects of poor estimation of effort and cost, but there are also some surprises. If you are responsible for a software project, you are on a software project, or you stand to lose if a project you are associated with goes south, you owe it to yourself and to your business to take in the lessons in this book."
—Phillip G. Armour, Vice-President of Systems, Corvus International Inc., and author of The Laws of Software Process

Product Description

Failed or abandoned software development projects cost the U.S. economy alone billions of dollars a year. In Software Development Failures, Kweku Ewusi-Mensah offers an empirically grounded study that suggests why these failures happen and how they can be avoided. Case studies analyzed include the well-known Confirm travel industry reservation program, FoxMeyer's Delta, the IRS's Tax System Modernization, the Denver International Airport's Baggage Handling System, and CODIS. It has been estimated that one-third of software development projects fail or are abandoned outright because of cost overruns, delays, and reduced functionality. Some consider this an acceptable risk -- that it is simply the cost of doing business. Ewusi-Mensah argues that understanding the factors involved in development failures will help developers and businesses bring down the rate of software failure and abandoned projects. Ewusi-Mensah explores the reasons software development projects are vulnerable to failure and why issues of management and organization are at the core of any failed project. He examines these projects not from a deterministically technical perspective but as part of a complex technical and social process; he proposes a framework of factors that contribute to the decision to abandon a project and enumerates the risks and uncertainties inherent in each phase of a project's life cycle. Exploring the multiplicity of factors that make software development risky, he presents empirical data that is reinforced by analyses of the reported cases. He emphasizes the role of the user in the development process and considers the effect of organizational politics on a project. Finally, he considers what lessons can be learned from past failures and how software development practices can be improved.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 290 pages
• Publisher: The MIT Press; annotated edition edition (September 14, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0262050722
• ISBN-13: 978-0262050722
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,830,237 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars This could have - and should have - been better, September 21, 2003

By	wiredweird "wiredweird" (Earth, or somewhere nearby) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)

Software development failures, depending on how you count, may outnumber the successes. Nearly a third of software projects are simply scrapped before completion. That waste may account for as much as US$85 billion, approaching 1% of the US gross domestic product. This topic is critical, in a world where everything, down to the pacemaker in a patient's chest, is driven by software.

A topic so important deserves a more stirring author than Ewusi-Mensah. I found this book dry, repetitive, and poorly organized. The book centers on a handful of case studies. Those case studies are barely mentioned until chapter four, though. Even then, I found it hard to follow the examples. The author does not present the samples one at a time, in their entirety, though. Instead, he presents one aspect of all five examples, then another facet of all five, and so on. Only in chapter seven, when the book is winding down, do I really see any depth in any of the case studies. Even then, just one is covered in any detail.

Ewusi-Mensah rightly describes the "code of silence" surrounding software project failure. His description the phenomenom seems shallow, though. Bruised egos and painful memories may well be part of the reason that failures get so little mention. Software training and practice may have more to do with the tendency to ignore failure, though. In every other field of engineering, practioners rely on knowing yield strengths and "absolute maximum" ratings of their parts and materials. The idea of failure is central to the practice, even to the legalities and forensics, of those fields. Programmers, though, are barely ever shown good examples of their craft, let alone bad examples. Management, design, and project control of software are even more ethereal - there simply is no common set of terms in which the failure can be described.

Petroski's writings show that engineering failures can be described in informative, constructive ways. Perhaps this book's target is more difficult - it discusses not the failures of the software itself, so much as failures in the process by which software is built. Perhaps, too, not every author can be a Petroski. Maybe the academic treatment really is more appropriate to this topic. If so, I would hope for an author who cites more of the field's literature and cites less of his own prior work.

4.0 out of 5 stars finds common factors to many failures, October 17, 2005

By	W Boudville (Terra, Sol 3) - See all my reviews (TOP 10 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

It's an unfortunate empirical observation that many large software projects fail. Why this happens, and how it can be avoided is the subject of the text. The author looks at several abandoned projects, for which solid information has been made publicly known. These include the Denver airport's baggage handling, and the IRS Tax System Modernisation. Though surely many other failures have been quietly buried by other groups.

The author finds that often, constraints, schedules or goals were placed outside the influence of the developers. While this does not pre-ordain failure, it seems to significantly increase its possibility. Another characteristic trait seems to be a lack of executive oversight. Leading to project drift, until that becomes irreversible.

The book's best help to you might be when you are starting a project.

2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars A failure in itself, September 30, 2003

By	Gerold Keefer (Landau/Pfalz) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

unfortunately this book does not deliver what it promisses. neither i find any theoretical in-depth analysis of specific software project failures nor reasonable checklists to guide practioners. instead, many common places that do not add value compared to the publications on the topic so far (Boehm, Jones, etc.).
it does not help that the book fails to describe the problems that make specifically software projects so hard to manage. see the freely available NATO software engineering conference papers from 1968 for more helpful information on software project failures.