Out of CHAOS comes a sobering view of the massive cost of maintaining legacy software. With suspect research methodologies and numbers in the ten of billions of dollars, clearly this is an industry that’s wasting a tremendous amount of money, effort, and customer goodwill.
In this chapter, we discovered…
Inefficiencies in the ways we build software cost businesses a fortune every year, and we can and must address that crisis.
The most widely quoted study of the software industry, the CHAOS Report, is fundamentally flawed yet its final conclusion—that our industry has a long way to go—is right.
The major studies on the software industry agree that we are losing at least tens of billions of dollars a year in the United States alone to broken software development processes.
Legacy code is a global problem, and one we all have a share in creating, so we must all take responsibility for solving it.
The Standish Group’s CHAOS Report looks at the success rate of software projects across our industry. It says most projects aren’t successful but defines “success” so poorly that the study isn’t useful. Regardless, other studies confirm that poor software development practices are costing industry at least tens of billions of dollars a year.
Even though it appears that most software projects are doomed to be unsuccessful, some projects are successful and many of them take a different approach to development. I began to look for alternative approaches for building software. Let’s take a look at some new ideas from smart people who are positively affecting software development.
http://www.infoq.com/articles/Interview-Johnson-Standish-CHAOS
http://www.versionone.com/assets/img/files/ChaosManifest_2011.pdf
http://www.versionone.com/assets/img/files/CHAOSManifesto2013.pdf
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