Robert E. Kraut

Since its inception, the software industry has been in crisis. As Blazer noted 20 years ago, “[Software] is unreliable, delivered late, unresponsive to change, inefficient, and expensive … and has been for the past 20 years” [4]. In a survey of software contractors and government contract officers, over half of the respondents believed that calendar overruns, cost overruns, code that required in-house modifications before being usable, and code that was difficult to modify were common problems in the software projects they supervised [22]. Even today, problems with software systems are common and highly-publicized occurrences.