Major reasons for software failure

There are often the cases, when the software is not shipped on time or even if it is shipped, it is not shipped with the quality that is expected of it, resulting in an eventual failure of the project.


A research conducted by market research firm Info-Tech Research Group says 95 per cent of information technology groups "are not delivering some number of projects on time or to the full satisfaction of the business executive."


While there may be many reasons for this, the major reasons involve the following:


Poorly defined scope:
In most of the cases, the reason is not the clarification of the requirements.

• It may be because of an unreasonable deadline from sales/management
• It may be due to overlooking the customer's expectations or it could have been preconceived notions from the start
• It could have been a developer promising a particular UI widget (The "gee whiz" factor) or it could have been a developer not challenging the inclusion of a particular UI widget (which, the customer, wants desperately)
• It could be that the projected savings were wrong or it could be that an important scope change was delayed until the next version

In the end, it all boils down to the user/customer expectations regarding a software. If you have met the customer's requirements, you have a successful software.

My friend, Hassan, has a very good post here, regarding the requirements gathering of a software project which can be a good reading source.

Unmotivated Developers:

In some of the cases, the software failure arrives because of a lack of interest or respect towards the software from some or whole of the development team. It may be due to the following reasons...

• Development team is not motivated enough for the project
• The hype against the project is not created before the arrival of the project to keep the team thinking about the project
• Lack of interest from the authorities/management in the project sometimes result in the lack of interest from the development team

Lack of Domain Knowledge:

Sometimes, it is the case when developers are assigned tasks and they have not enough knowledge about the project or about the organization for which they are developing the project.

• One of the reason could be that the development team has not been given much time to do R & D for the project
• The development team hired for the project has not enough background experience for related developments
• The development team hired for the project is incompetent for producing the goods on time

In the end, I think it all concludes to the fact that the customer satisfaction is the first and fore-most thing and all the above factors contribute to the satisfaction (or dissatisfaction) of the customer. 

As a project manager, we must look into these factors before going ahead for the development of the project.

We can minimize the risks mentioned above by doing the following simple tasks:

1. Focus on features not implementation tasks.
2. Work in iterations (like weekly or biweekly).
3. Release working features to your staging environment in order of priority.
4. Unit test your code as you go, so you're not slowed down by a bug-list that increases geometrically as you approach the release date.
5. Be prepared to cut scope from the less important features. Stuff always takes longer than you think it will.
6. Make sure you sketch out the UI in advance (if there is a UI), and show it to potential users.
7. Test, test, and test some more. This seems counter-intuitive, but it saves more time than takes.