Software failure

Question 1.1: Software in the Information Society

1. See if you can discern any trends. Explain with evidence any trends that you discover.

Software is everywhere around us today and it had evolved over time to make our jobs simpler and easier. Over the last decade there had been a surge in the number of software projects to meet the increased demands. A research company call CompTIA released a statement in 2013 predicting the growth of IT professionals in the United States will increase by 22% by 2020, this illustrates the demands for software are high and rising.

We have witnessed some immense changes in the industry ever since the “The Software Crisis” (1965-1985) where many problems in software development were identified. This included the Therac-25 incident and the aviation industry; which was plagued with software problems. Then came the 1985-1989 period where we manage to find solutions to the “Software Crisis”, by formalising methods, documentation and creating standards for software development.

We have seen software failures across the board and Charette (2005) listed some common factors on why projects often fail;

• Unrealistic or unarticulated project goals,

• Inaccurate estimates of needed resources,

• Badly defined system requirements

• Poor reporting of the project's status

• Unmanaged risks

• Poor communication among customers, developers, and users

• Use of immature technology

• Inability to handle the project's complexity

• Sloppy development practices

• Poor project management

• Stakeholder politics

• Commercial pressures

These are some examples of failures identified in a study (Verna, Smapson, Cerpa):

• A Sydney Water Board project o Excessive rework costs o Inadequate planning and specifications

o...

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...failures.

NASA for example, have in place rigorous reviews of their most life-critical software systems and the world of healthcare should emulate those programs. The safety-critical systems dependent on computers should be deployed only with the greatest amount of care. It is evident we have not exercised such care as in 2010 a glitch in software of Gisborne Hospital resulted in one patient’s details being displayed as those of another. This can lead to misdiagnoses, mistreatment and potentially serious harm.

Knight (1990) noted “The integration of software quality assurance, safety analysis, and independent verification and validation as well as independent testing activities, will greatly enhance the safety, reliability, and maintainability of such life-critical systems.”

In summary all projects are prone to failure if they are not planned and management well.