I got into a mini-argument with my boss recently regarding "project failure." After three years, our project to migrate a codebase to a new platform (a project I was on for 1.5 years, but my team lead was on for only a few months) went live. He, along with senior management of both my company and the client (I'm one of those god-awful co...
Most importantly, why did it fail? What I'm looking for here is pathologies that anyone, whether new to the team or just waking up one day,can spot. ...
Our company is engaging an external Systems Integrator to develop its new mission critical system. I was hoping to compile the likely reasons it will fail so that we can anticipate these and safe guard against them. ...
What would you say are the most significant mistakes made by a typical project manager? By "most significant", I mean with a large negative impact on the project. And the context is line-of-business projects, where software isn't the main product of the organization. For each mistake you discuss, it would be great if you could note the...
Whilst answering “Dealing with awful estimates” posted by Ash I shared a few tips that I learned and personally use to spot weak estimates. But I am certain there must be many more! What heuristics to use in the scenario when one needs to make a quick evaluation of software project estimate that has been compiled by a third-party (a col...
I recently had a project that almost failed miserably. To me it's a complete failure but somehow it passed, shouldn't have, just did. There was a lot of good will on all sides and the blame was shared equally. But now that I put the project files into "cold storage" I wonder what will happen in "the worst-case scenario". You are on a sin...
Is there a good list of "worst software project failures ever" in the history of software development? For example in Canada a "gun registry" project spent around two billion dollars. This is of course, insane, even if the final product "sort of worked". I have heard of an FBI Case file system which there have been several attempts...
I recently read this post regarding how "Agile Fails Better" and found myself wondering if anyone out there had good examples of how their project under an agile management process failed...and more importantly how they got the project back on track. Question: How did your agile project fail? Were you able to recover from it? How did yo...
Many computer science curricula include a class or at least a lecture on disasters caused by software bugs, such as the Therac-25 incidents or Ariane 5 Flight 501. Indeed, Wikipedia has a list of software bugs with serious consequences, and a question on StackOverflow addresses some of them too. We study the failures of the past so tha...
Risk management is defined trough several processes that pretend to identify and control the possible risks that may affect the succes of a project. The most common methodology for RM is Failure Mode Effect Analysis. Does anybody know some other methodologies used in the management of risk?? ...
A while ago I was given the task of updating and extending the functionality of a software project. I was given a year to make the needed changes working solo. A month into development I came to the conclusion that it would take longer to change the existing product than to rewrite it from the ground up (a decision I now regret). I'd ne...