From: miket@hermes.tcs.com (Michael Turner nmscore Assoc.)
Subject: Re: Do Software Engineers Actualy Do So Badly?
Organization: Teknekron Communications Inc.
Date: Tue, 13 Oct 1992 06:06:52 GMT

In article <1992Oct10.040112.16113@nstn.ns.ca> bushell@fox.nstn.ns.ca (Tom Bushell) writes:
>
>
>In the article that started this whole thread, Ken Magel asks:
>
>>Do Software Engineers Actually Do So Badly?           
>>
>In Brad Cox's book: "Object Oriented Programming" from 1986, he
>quotes an inquiry carried through by the U.S. Government
>Accounting
>Office in 1979, in which a breakdown of software costs versus
>actual
>results is performed (FGMSD-80-4). The results at that time were:
>
>Software paid for but not delivered: 47%
>Software delivered but not used:     29%
>Software abandoned or reworked:      19%
>Software used after change:           3%
>Software used as delivered:           2%
>

Granted, this is *government* work, but it compels the question: why
is a failure rate like this tolerated?  Clearly, it must be.  I wouldn't
be surprised if these figures reflect a waste of taxpayer's money
that outstrips all that was lost in the S&L fiasco.  Why is there no
congressional inquiry going on?

I think it's tolerated because it isn't directly felt or measured, for
the most part (unlike the S&L crisis, which was dramatized by pensioners
losing their life savings, and complaining about it on TV).  I remember
asking one of our managers at my last government job what had happened
to a particular sponsor.  He said they had decided we couldn't help
them.  I asked what happened to the $500,000 we took from them.  He
said that we spent it on other things.  I asked if these particular
sponsors weren't a little disturbed about that.  He replied, blandly,
(I'll never forget this), "Well, it wasn't really their money, anyway."
I WAS THE ONLY ONE COMPLAINING!

The fact is, the payback on investment in software projects is often
not carefully measured (or measured at all).  In large organizations
(governmental and corporate) all over the world, powerful people who
don't have much of a clue about computers are charged with the
responsibility of computerizing one thing or another.  Are they being
punished by someone even more powerful?  Is the company looking for a
write-off?  Are they responding to a regulatory requirement?  Are they
developing something just to scare a union into concessions?  Was
somebody all charged up about the technology, only to get bored with it
and forget about it later?  Or are they actually pretty agonized when
systems don't work out, but don't want to break the bad news to people
who could unseat them, such as taxpayers or stockholders?  All these
things happen, and it's in the nature of these things that you will
seldom hear about them.  As DeMarco says, you can't control what you
can't measure, and you sure can't measure what people aren't telling
you about.

Software is expensive, but unlike a building or bridge or a tunnel,
it occupies almost no space.  Magnetic tapes containing working-but-
unused software look just like ones that contain non-working software.
Embarassments are easily covered up.

Maybe that's why we need cyberspace: how else could most people see how
monumentally expensive--and monumentally bad--most software is unless
there were some monuments they could go and visit?
---
Michael Turner
miket@tcs.com