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The Death of Big Software

By Stephen J. Andriole
Communications of the ACM, December 2017, Vol. 60 No. 12, Pages 29-32
10.1145/3152722
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The Death of Big Software, illustration — Credit: Alicia Kubista / Andrij Borys Associates

Why would anyone undertake a multi-year software project today? Or upgrade an in-house-hosted legacy application? Or build—or use—anything that behaved like a monolithic software application? Big software project failure data is legendary.¹¹ There are myriad horror stories with titles like "9 VERY Scary ERP and ERP System Implementation Statistics."¹² The Standish Group actually labels their annual technology project analyses as "Chaos Reports."¹⁴ They reported that 66% of all technology projects completely or partially failed in 2015.

So assuming that management is reasonably well informed, it knows that big software projects are likely to fail. Yet in the 1990s and early 21^st century there were still companies willing to try their hand with big software and prove they were unlike the others who failed so spectacularly. In spite of this unjustifiable optimism, many of these companies also failed. Even the U.S. Defense Department failed spectacularly.⁶

Comments

Alexander Todorovic

December 24, 2017 04:28

Fantastic article!

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