Of all the commercial projects you've personally worked on, how many have been canned/succeeded?

Question

I don't mean personal projects. I mean projects where there were a number of people involved and business dollars were spent.

Answer 1

Generally - I think you would be surprised as to just how many projects are run in corporations or big software companies, and are suddenly scraped, or run from the beginning with full knowledge that they might never see their first customer.

Goes without saying that nowadays, companies are going over their portfolios, and these types of projects are the first to go.

Answer 2

Often I left before I could see how it turns out.

Answer 3

In 10 years, I've only been personally involved in one project that was canned - and that was because the customer pulled out. I've seen a number of projects for other teams/companies evaporate though - usually due to:

• over-engineered / too much complexity causing it to spiral like crazy, without actually delivering the original project goals
• lack of commitment / involvement from the customer

With the former, it often takes a very brave person (perhaps director level) to pull the plug; the problem is, when you've already spent $VeryBig, it is very hard to be the person to say "throw it away" - if you can keep saying "just another $RelativelyBig and it'll be OK", well... and the cycle repeats with different people playing budget-chicken, until something gives and a scapegoat needs to be found.

Answer 4

Roughly 25%... so 3 years of my working life has been spent on projects which were canned.

This ranges from small, one week projects, to one multi-year project.
From one man jobs, to the 15 or so person team for the multi-year project.

Answer 5

I've been a developer for 14 years and have only worked on one project that was canned. It was a badly specced projected that turned into a real deathmarch. In order to move it along I upped the team and moved to a disused office for 6 months so we could focus on it without any distractions.

Anyway, we eventually got bought out by another company at the height of the dot-com boom and they canned the project as they had something similar.

Answer 6

I cannot comment on this publicly out of concern that I myself may get canned.

Answer 7

I started out as tech support in my university while I studied. The tech support there was canned and outsourced couple of years after I left.

After my studies, I worked in a company, working on the "intranet managing system" and being the father of an internal shop. They both seem to be running mostly unchanged 4+ years after my team was canned and the department was outsourced.

I was in my next company for two years. We developed a "product", but as far as I know, it's never been sold/deployed in production anywhere for 2+ years.

My current company (I'm leaving the 24th) has several websites in production, some of them for large companies and lots of users. My code is running in production.

Answer 8

Your question is wide open, mostly because the definition of "Success" is somewhat difficult to make. We can declare a project successful if

• user like it
• the application is live in production for x amount of time
• it was delivered on budget
• it was delivered on time
• it was a financial success
• it was a business success
• etc etc

By the way you asked the question, you seem to implicitely declare success if a project is not canned.

If a company develops product A for $3 million, and 2 years later replaces it with product B, I would not call project A a success, despite the fact that it delivered. I actually believe that while technically we have most projects under control today, more or less, a lot more mistakes are being made on the business-end of software development projects. I have worked on very, very few projects that could be called successful in an all-inclusive sense - maybe less than 10%.