Reasons for Failure of software projects

1. The maturity of the software engineering field

   • The software engineering field is much younger than the other engineering fields and that, in time, will get more stable
   • The field is young and therefore most of the field engineers and managers are also young. Young people have less experience and therefore tend to fail more
   • Young people are more optimistic and tend to estimate badly

2. Shortage of knowledge base

   As a relatively young engineering field, software engineering is short of accumulative knowledge bases. For example, the famous gang of four book "Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software" was first published in late 1994. The book suggests design patterns to common software design problems and it is one of the famous knowledge base materials in the software engineering field. "Software engineering has evolved steadily from its founding days in the 1940s"(5), but it is still short of accumulative knowledge base as opposed to other engineering fields. Another example is OOP (Object Oriented Paradigm). OOP is considered to be more successful than the previous procedural paradigm. OOP was only embraced by the Software industry in the 1990s. "Even though it originated in the 1960s, OOP was not commonly used in mainstream software application development until the 1990s."(Wikipedia)

3. Software is not tangible

   As opposed to other engineering fields like civil engineering, the software engineering building blocks are much less tangible and therefore hard to measure and estimate. "Software is abstract"(2)

4. Competition: harsh deadlines

   The competition in the software industry is harsh. The Time-To-Market (TTM) is crucial and the drive to meet harsh deadlines is enormous. This characteristic, along with other methodological anomalies like"Code first; think later" and "Plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow," makes competition harsh. The hard competition in the software industry causes not only the need to deliver ASAP, but also the requirement to catch as many potential customer eyes as possible. Firing in every direction causes disorganization, fast coding and projects that are not well planned.

5. Technology changes rapidly

   "Software development technologies change faster than other construction technologies."(2) Until recently, Microsoft was frequently bombarding the industry with new technologies. Rapid technology changes introduce liability for software manufactures. For example, new Operating Systems obligate a company like Ahead to release a new adaptable version of Nero. A few years ago, Microsoft had decided to change the way it introduced new technologies to the software industry. It introduced the wave methodology. In this methodology, Microsoft agreed to release a bundle of technologies (tools, Framework, programming languages etc.) in waves, every several years and by that, let the software industry adapt and digest the new upcoming technologies. Lots of popular software like Ulead Video Studio and Nero that used to run on Windows XP do not run on Windows Vista.

6. Change is tempting

   A building architect will not decide to add additional floors during the building construction. The result would be dreadful, as the building foundations were not constructed for it. The software architect's hand, however, will be much more loose on the trigger. Irresponsible changes like adding new features and redefining existed ones may cause deadline violations and/or bad planning and coding (patch). Given the harsh competition (see item 6), it looks like changes are inevitable.

7. Bad time management

   Estimating the development time should correlate to the employees ("resources") on hand. In some cases, managers estimate and then enforce a time table as if they were the ones who were going to do the developing. This type of enforcement yields pressure on development and may harm it. Moreover, violating deadlines in this condition is common.