Date: March 10, 2001
Author: Ronald Wolak

Subject: System Development Bibliography Comment

 

System Development Bibliography Comment on

Annotated Bibliography #1 by Chaelynne Wolak

 

  Chaelynne’s evaluation of the Hayes article summarized the author’s attempt to identify key factors leading to the failure of software development projects and to present techniques for increasing the probability of their success. In fact, Ambler (1999) reported that the software development industry has an 80 to 90 percent failure rate for large-scale, mission critical projects.

Hays contended that to succeed we need to play by new rules and reorient the SDLC process to today’s conditions. These new rules include:

Hays argued that the need to change is driven by the 90-day development cycles that have become the norm. In addition, the complexity of hardware and software is orders of magnitude greater than when SDLC concepts were first conceived.

            In a related article, Frailey (2000) commented that software development life cycles have decreased because of market driven factors that include shorter product life expectancies and increased competition. Like Hays, he recommended the use of “small batches” in response to constantly changing requirements. He reasoned that small batches reduce the amount of thrown away or reworked code when requirements are redefined halfway through the process. He also warned not to eliminate “overhead” activities (e.g. quality assurance) in a misguided effort to decrease cycle time. Although many overhead activities appear to slow things down, the opposite is most often the case.

In summary, the Hays article made a valid case for reevaluating SDLC procedures in light of current failure rates and changing market conditions.

A brief note about the author: Linda Hayes is CEO of WorkSoft, Inc. WorkSoft is a software developer that markets Certify, a business-user-oriented automated testing system (WorkSoft, 2001). Certify is designed to assure success by creating models of business processes and operations that test technology changes prior to affecting production.

References

Ambler, S. (1999, October). Enhancing the Unified Process. Software Development Online.  Retrieved March 10, 2001, from the World Wide Web: http://www.sdmagazine.com/articles/1999/0010/0010b/0010b.htm.

Frailey, D. (2000, August). Reducing Cycle Time. Software Development Online.  Retrieved March 10, 2001, from the World Wide Web: http://www.sdmagazine.com/articles/2000/0008/0008f/0008f.htm.

WorkSoft. (2001). Enterprise Productivity Solutions.  Retrieved March 10, 2001, from the World Wide Web: http://www.worksoft.com/products/index.html.